Abandoned Sh*t
I collect photos of abandoned stuff, particularly the untold story of abandoned shoes which have haunted me since I was a kid. As a living thing marching towards oblivion, I'm interested in the theme of decay. I lived next door to the Godfather of Auto-Destructive Art (the Late, Great Gustav Metzger for 12 years) and I learned a lot from him about his own interest in art which is about decay and destruction. His family were murdered in the concentration camps during WW2 and he was one of the Kinder Transport children, brought to the UK to live with a British family and later studying at Art School and becoming a major artist of the 20th Century. One my own personal favourite ongoing projects is a photographic study of dead insects which I've been documenting for about 10 years. It's about death and our attitudes to it, bodies and lots of other things around entropy and the tendency towards disorder, which reminds me how amazing life is.. Not just ours, but all livings things put two fingers up to Old Father Time and refuse to follow entropy's spiral path. Yes it's energy intensive and we do not outrun the laws of thermodynamics. We make our living from the nuclear reactions of the sun, spitting out photons and allowing our cells to breathe fire but our DNA, unlike inorganic matter copies itself over time with minute copying errors allowing (some) of our descendants to adapt and take advantage of changing circumstances over time. It's such a beautiful thing life and such a gift, that we often take it for granted. Decaying objects act as a constant reminder of life and it's fight against time.
A Rusty Old Motorbike Chain
which had been left wrapped around a lampost in Compton Terrace, Islington, North East London reminded me of the irony (get it ?) of being bound by the chains of time. Eventually these chains would return to the earth as oxidation renders solid iron into dust, in the blink of the cosmic eye. My own little cosmic eye noticed something about the deeper meaning of decay as my constantly churning molecules rolled on by. I have other photos of rusty chains, from harbours in the Greek Islands, even rustier than these.. The salt speeds up the process. I have photos of rusty manhole covers, beautiful in their own right and I also have photos of rusty tractor wheels and rusty sculptures but this image of the pile of abandoned bike chain expresses my thoughts about time, life, decay, entropy and our (DNA's) refusal to submit to it's strict one way street laws ;)