Not many people here yet - the series

Click here for my Photomonitor review of his series.

The crowds series developed into Not many people here yet’, a large scale project with three large digital works alongside original photographs, some of which I embroidered.

Not many people here yet is a playfully nostalgic unveiling of friendship and shared experiences across time.

It is a playful unveiling of friendship, journeys, and shared experiences across a century.

Milly and Lily, from a 1920s photo album, feature alongside other people who are connected by place, disconnected by time.

Three large composites show fictional crowds during the pandemic, in the areas of Dorset and Jersey that Milly and Lily had visited almost a century ago. Images appropriated online were digitally edited, blended, with painterly effects added.

Original photographs of Milly, Lily and myself form part of the project, having visited the same beauty spots.
Some of those photographs have been embroidered or painted, my tactile involvement providing a metaphor for our inseparable connections.

Messages on the back of postcards sent from these places over the past century (smooth flight, very few people are here yet, would you like a pair of black elephants), gave me inspiration and the title.
One composite shows crowds on a stormy coastline. Another has props in front of faces, hands & feet as a reference to face coverings. Some masks are newspaper clips from 2020. The third has surreal elements.
It is a story of journeys before and during a time when the world’s travel stopped.

Out and about , the third in the series, is a digital fictional composite placing people together at Bouley Bay. Scores of images appropriated online were manipulated, cut, resized. Props were photographed at home and added to create surreal elements, as a reference to the times we found ourselves in during 2020-2021. I am asleep on the cliff in my red slippers underneath a lamp.