UrbanWorks
My practice has always been rooted in material, process, and place. For many years the sea and shoreline were both my subject and my studio, providing fragments, sediments, and traces that I collected and reconfigured into images.
In 2022, at the age of 72 and after 35 years living and working in a rural /coastal environment of North Northumberland, my wife and I made a huge decision to relocate to the centre of a large city, Newcastle Upon Tyne.
The move brought a shift in focus. Here, the coastline gave way to the city’s industrial landscape. Memories were stirred of my childhood, feral in post industrial revolution Salford and its Lowryesque landscape of the remnants of the industrial recolution, chimneys, factories, railways and canals.
Copper and glass—once at the heart of technological and chemical innovation—became both a literal and symbolic medium. Sheets of copper plate and glass, etched, distressed, and corroded with everyday products freely used in home and garden, are painstakingly constructed, scanned and transformed into images that hover between photography, painting, and archaeology.
These works are not photographs of the world but rather photographic objects made from it. Chemical residues, abrasion, and oxidation create marks that echo both the history of photography’s early experiments and the material scars left by industry.
This body of work, which I call URBANWORKS, reflects my ongoing fascination with the dialogue between natural processes and human intervention. Each piece is at once fragile and enduring, intimate and monumental.
What began as a response to new surroundings has become a meditation on transformation and memory—of consumerism, of metals, of cities, and of photographic practice itself.
In 2022, at the age of 72 and after 35 years living and working in a rural /coastal environment of North Northumberland, my wife and I made a huge decision to relocate to the centre of a large city, Newcastle Upon Tyne.
The move brought a shift in focus. Here, the coastline gave way to the city’s industrial landscape. Memories were stirred of my childhood, feral in post industrial revolution Salford and its Lowryesque landscape of the remnants of the industrial recolution, chimneys, factories, railways and canals.
Copper and glass—once at the heart of technological and chemical innovation—became both a literal and symbolic medium. Sheets of copper plate and glass, etched, distressed, and corroded with everyday products freely used in home and garden, are painstakingly constructed, scanned and transformed into images that hover between photography, painting, and archaeology.
These works are not photographs of the world but rather photographic objects made from it. Chemical residues, abrasion, and oxidation create marks that echo both the history of photography’s early experiments and the material scars left by industry.
This body of work, which I call URBANWORKS, reflects my ongoing fascination with the dialogue between natural processes and human intervention. Each piece is at once fragile and enduring, intimate and monumental.
What began as a response to new surroundings has become a meditation on transformation and memory—of consumerism, of metals, of cities, and of photographic practice itself.
