EGHow did you begin the Concrete Island project?

PAConcrete Island came out of an experiment I did called the Photographer and Puppeteer, 2009. It was a film that documented a performance. I took a puppeteer into a space under a flyover of the A406 (a ring road in the suburbs of North London) and filmed her whilst she used material from the site to make a puppet. It was a series of locked off shots. One of these was the wall of the overpass as I wanted to refer the viewer to the notion of intervention within this environment. Later it occurred to me that these marks had resonance.

At the time I was thinking about a film that I saw in Global cities at Tate Modern in 2007 by Osman Bozkurt called Auto – Park / The Highway Parks of Istanbul 2003. The video observes people finding green areas to enjoy and rest, in the outskirts of Istanbul: using spaces between highways as their picnic area. This transgressive use of space reverberated with my own concerns with social, political and functional use of the landscape: boundaries that are blurred when one reaches the outskirts of any city. I’d also been thinking about Stephen Willats’ work The Lurky place, 1978 the description of the landscape that he was working with and the objects found on site being the consequence of human interaction with the landscape.

The landscape of The Lurky Place contains many images which are distanced from the institutions, norms and conventions which hold the fabric of society together. The nature of this place is, of course, a product of the surrounding society – it forms a fulfilling context for behaviour and activities outside normal, daily life.

(Stephen Willats, The Lurky Place, 1978)

EGCan you talk a little about your working methods?

PAI tend to get obsessed with a particular site and then explore it in different ways. I then concentrate on a particular approach, adapting the projects parameters as I define more specifically what my intentions are with the work. It’s quite an organic methodology.

There is often a lot of walking involved to find the ‘right’ site. I usually start projects by looking at all the digital shots that I take. They often form a visual diary and are where the work develops before moving on to film: most often 5” x 4”.

Getting to know the site is the most important thing. There is a lot of repetition over a period of time: going back to the same site at different times of day. I even repeat the same shot. I’m a bit slow and often knock my head against the wall before I decide on a specific aesthetic. I wish it wasn’t like this but it takes me a long while to realise a new route. This is really true of Covered, 2009 – 2010 which keeps on evolving in different ways.

EGYour work often deals with physical marks on the landscape; whether a familiar or peripheral space. Can you talk about your interest in these interventions; what sparked your interest in working in this way?

PAI suppose it stems from an engagement with notions of photographic reality. Jeff Wall’s dissection of his practice into documentary, near-documentary and Cinematographic image has helped me question the construction of picture making. How these distinctions manifestly change the viewer’s reading of the work. This approach to photography in an art context highlighted for me how these labels are read in reference to each other.

During my MA my practice shifted considerably from being a straight documentary practice to elements of intervention within the landscape, to performative actions or tableau designed for the camera. I think my current practice is returning to the document. To depicting what I see around me. However it is always presented to the viewer within a specific conceptual framework which is where my intervention as an artist lies. I find fluidly playing with labels of the image extremely interesting, controlling the structure, its framing and choice of context. The notion of the traces of human activity stems from an engagement with the medium of photography: notions of indexicality and the trace are well trodden ground in reference to the photographic image but are still interesting. I suppose these concerns have spilt over into my choice of focus; the strange and wonderful array of things that surround us all; but that perhaps we take for granted or go unobserved.

EGThe images inhabit a very quiet, painterly space; which I imagine is a contrast to the experience of actually being at the space, given its location? Is this contrast between the experience of the image and the experience of the space something that you consciously play with in your work?

PAI usually shoot at dusk on Sunday night so there is not that much traffic about nor industrial machinery working in the locale. It is really dirty with dust from the road and surrounding waste disposal outlets but it is actually quite tranquil at times. There is the repeated de dun de dun of the cars passing. People may not want to have a picnic there but there is an element of escapism. However I don’t consider my work to be a quest for an Edenic or utopian ideal within urban edge space, though perhaps they can be read as such.

EGYou reference JG Ballard in your recent work; do you feel this connection to text plays an important role in your work?

PAIt does for Concrete Island. The project’s title refers to a JG Ballard’s novel of the same name in which an architect becomes stranded between intersecting motorways after a car crash: a modern interpretation of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. There is a chapter in the novel called ‘Naming the Island’ which was particularly influential.

Carried away by his own enthusiasm, Proctor ignored him. He scribbled away at the concrete, mixing up the fragments of Maitland’s name, happily chalking the letters in streamers down to the ground, as if determined to cover every inch of the Island’s surface with what he assumed to be his name.

(JG Ballard Concrete Island, 1973)

I just instantly thought about this when I discovered the graffiti made in chalk on the walls. The writing although being overtly political seems to be confused a melange of traced statements copied from pamphlets and slogans picked up from protests. These direct considered forms of communication have an interesting relationship with the other marks made through environmental or incidental traces: the marks of a digger, the drips of tar. These elements together become like an archeologically mind map. There is something of this quality in the work of Ballard.

Sometimes he wonders what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would be merely an encumbrance.

(JG Ballard The Drowned World, 1963)

EGWhat are you working on at the moment?

PAThe area surrounding the site I have inhabited for Concrete Island is in the process of being cleared. So the space under the flyover is plainly visible from the road. Consequently a whole series of new graffiti has cropped up covering over the marks that I have been photographing for the past eight months. I view this as a positive thing as I am forced to re-engage with the site: to go deeper. I have done this in quite a physical way and I am now working in the canals surrounding the site. There are all these weird scratches on the wall made by the overhanging plants and I have been documenting these. Also elements of sculpture are creeping in and the relationship between the organic forms and the concrete. The working title of this work is the Drowned World another Ballard reference but not as referential to the novel as Concrete Island. I’m not sure where it will lead: getting wet no doubt. In a wider sense it’s quite a transitional period for both my career and working practice so I am not sure quite where it is going. I really want to push the boundaries of my practice.