London, England

My practice explores the use of the still and moving image in suggesting metaphysical space. My meditative visual language engages with the potentials and restrictions of lens-based media and the evolving relationship between politics, landscape and art histories. I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Photography and the Archive Research Centre, University of the Arts London. In 2014 I was artist in residence at A.M. Qattan Foundation, Palestine, and Kaunas Photo Gallery in Lithuania and received a Triangle International Fellowship. My recent group and solo exhibitions include Garden State, Ffotogallery, Cardiff, and The Mosaic Rooms, London (2015); Gardening the Suburbs, Makan Art Space, Amman (2014); I See Europe! Kunstbezirk, Stuttgart (2013); Brighton Photo Biennial, UK (2012). I am currently artist in residence at Aktuelle Architektur Der Kultur, Murcia, Spain.

Croydonisation (2008 and 2015)

In Croydon town centre, errors of judgement are constructed on the ruins of failed visions, major roads dissect the town centre, mini-manhattan skyscrapers render pavements into unwalkable wind tunnels. Croydonisation comprises of a photograph printed on a bus shelter poster, hung next to a public notice, a love letter to Croydon written by Croydon-born architect Vincent Lacovara. Lacovara’s love letter explores his conflicting feelings of tenderness and disappointment with a place that since its regeneration began in the 1890s continues to be used as an example of failed British town planning.

Croydonisation was originally commissioned by the Museum of Croydon.

A Love Letter to Croydon
Variations on a theme by Willam Congreve

Dearest Croydon,

Please don’t take this the wrong way.

I was telling someone about you the other day – your beautifully broken ring road and your string of unrealized visions; your big buildings next to small buildings and your empty car parks – and was reminded of a passage from ‘The Way of the World’ by William Congreve. It’s a Restoration drama, first performed in 1700. I studied it for my A-Levels at one of your 156 schools. Maybe you know the play too? Anyway, when I remembered it I was inspired to speed straight home on your super-efficient Tram system and found my old copy of the play (Dover Thrift Editions) on my bookshelf, between a book on brickwork and the Story of Art by E.H. Gombrich. It didn’t take me long to find the relevant passage as it is quite near the beginning, in Act I, Scene III. I re-read it and it really does remind me of you. It’s quite amazing.

I felt it best that I write to you and share the passage with you. Better that than to have it all welling up inside. I also wanted to share the list that I have started to compile for you, about you. Yes, a list! But more of that later.

Again, please, please, please don’t take this the wrong way.

Here is the passage from ‘The Way of the World’ by William Congreve. Act I Scene III. The character Fainal is quizzing Mirabell about his attitudes towards his love, Millamant:

“FAINALL For a passionate lover methinks you are a man somewhat too discerning in the failings of your mistress.

MIRABELL And for a discerning man somewhat too passionate a lover, for I like her with all her faults; nay, like her for her faults. Her follies are so natural, or so artful, that they become her, and those affectations which in another woman would be odious serve but to make her more agreeable. I’ll tell thee, Fainall, she once used me with that insolence that in revenge I took her to pieces, sifted her, and separated her failings: I studied ‘em and
got ‘em by rote. The catalogue was so large that I was not without hopes, one day or other, to hate her heartily. To which end I so used myself to think of ‘em, that at length, contrary to my design and expectation, they gave me every hour less and less disturbance, till in a few days it became habitual to me to remember ‘em without being displeased. They are now grown as familiar to me as my own frailties, and in all probability in a little time longer I shall like ‘em as well.

FAINALL Marry her, marry her; be half as well acquainted with her charms as you are with her defects, and, my life on’t, you are your own man again.”

Croydon. Do you see it? You are my Millamant!