Number 49

When I moved to Leigh at the end of last year, I knew it was likely that I’d be inspired creatively by my environment as that seems to be something of a pattern in my work. This didn’t turn out to be quite as I’d anticipated. I think a lot of this was owing to a general, low level background of accumulative fatigue that seemed to cling for some time to everything I did and make even the simplest creative attempts feel fairly mechanical and meaningless. However, I realised in the last few weeks as I’ve been staying at my uncles, that there has been an important local environment that has influenced, or at least supported my recent experience, and that had formed a key factor in my decision to move to the area in the first place.

My great uncle has lived in his bungalow in Leigh on Sea for my entire life, and I believe, most of his. I’ve been visiting it since I was a baby. It was a regular summer holiday location when I was a child and it became something of a ‘bolt hole’ sanctuary for me in adult years. It occurred to me, possibly last summer, that it was also the last home I was still able to visit from my childhood years, following the inevitable sale of my mum and dad’s parents’ houses, as well as, more recently, the house I grew up in. I know full well that it is only a matter of time (hopefully a lot of time, but you never know) before this is also a place I can no longer visit and I felt that I wanted to, if not capture it, at least respond visually to some of the little practical features that may seem mundane but are, in fact, the bricks that build a domestic space. The trivial details that all houses at once have in common and yet couldn’t realise more differently. The things that reflect the personality of the people that live there, that tell a myriad of silent stories; the things that make a house a home.

That urge has been perhaps the most genuine creative impulse I’ve had (outside of my renewed love of writing poetry) for the best part of 18 months and so this new collection of fifty images exploring and affectionately recording my uncle’s home aims to do so with a light touch; a recognition that these things, despite their apparent consistency and age, will still change and pass. It doesn’t aim to pin them down like dry and dusty butterflies or set them, frozen, in temporal amber, but jot them down almost, like visual notes. A lovingly informal record of something that has been and will no longer be, but that serves to hold a great deal of value to me for all the while that it is.