In April last year I travelled to Weymouth. This was a momentous occasion for me, you see, it had been over three years since I had enjoyed a solitary break, a journey to the seaside on my own. It was magical. I was broken. Things in my life were all coming apart. The first day was ok, but it all started to collapse by the evening of the second. My life, the person I was had begun to come apart.
It doesn’t matter.
I take a stroll, and on that stroll I take photographs. Late into the night, anything that catches my eye. I have no idea what I might find. Sometimes nothing. Sometimes, looking back over those photos I find something I’d been looking for.
Occasionally I will find a photo that elucidates something, that puts into view what words have failed to convey. A mistake, an accident or chance. I am provided the resource to go on.
I ruminate upon an image, I draw my diagrams, transcribe meticulously and a adapt, I make my own, this image. In isolation, as raw data, another file on a hard drive, it is meaningless, an aberration brought on by shaky hands drunk with denial, with loss and with booze. But in context, tied to the significance of a journey, surrounded and enabled with the other fruits of that trip, it is a statement, a sentence in the paragraph of this document.
The work is a sequence.
I have just returned from another holiday, one contextually removed from this particular story, perhaps a more abstract, metaphysical tale than the tragic romance of my Dorset based reminiscence. There, as I walked for miles along the Kentish coast, I began to consider the sequential. It seems, sadly, in these last few years, I have mostly abandoned the story telling in my work, the long form considerations of a theme.
I mean, I continue this to a degree, the varying exegesis of my visual output, but in some ways, the sense of continuity has been lost, the themes, the overall sense of a wider picture is there, but the focus, the story, the point, is lost. Of course, this implies that I do in fact have a point, perhaps I don’t. Maybe this chaos of overlapping ideas and vague allusions to events is its own reward. Either way, this train of thought leads me to consider something more… substantial?
We shall see what the future brings. For now. Melting buildings.