The technology & sophistication of the present-day camera seem to grow proportionately to the increasingly boring subject matter it records.
—Steven Pippin

Notes from underground

→ NORMALITY IS BLISS came about by a combination of the above image of an old soap tray against white tiles, in a fortnight whereby I received three phone calls. One informing me that my dad had been sectioned, another that my mother-in-law had been given 4 months to live, and the third that my partner was being called into hospital for a few days after blood test results from a mystery, ongoing illness since the turn of the year. At the cashpoint I found that I couldn’t draw any money, only to discover my account had been hacked and temporarily suspended.

I explained to my opponent why I couldn’t pay half of the Squash court fee before an amateur league game and he looked at me quizzically, deciding whether to accept this or not. I won the game, and on a wintery night decided not to change out of my sweat-soaked kit as usual, but simply go home. Unlocking my bike the zip of my jacket had fastened and unfastened all the way to the neck, whereby the zip became stuck. I climbed onto the bike and the pedal underneath my foot gave way and fell to the floor. I looked at the pedal for a while in the same way my opponent had considered my story with an expression of implausibility. Somehow, it had simply sheared off from the thread.

Walking home in my shorts it occurred to me that to every person I passed in the icy cold street that it looked as though I was wearing a strange kind of cape, and the previous coasting boredom of crushing normality suddenly looked glorious by comparison. I began to consider the various shifts in thinking required over the years to adjust and adapt to a new set of circumstances.

→ MY CARPET LOOKS LIKE CRAP AND I HATE IT came about completely by accident. I was attempting to take a promo shot of a now abandoned idea involving 3 oddly shaped boxes emitting different sounds. I didn’t like the idea in the end and felt depressed about the time and money spent upon it. Different material and coloured fabric came and went, as did various box sizes. I had the use of an empty gallery space for a few days and between pubs I asked two people from book club if they wouldn’t mind sitting in front of the ‘speakers’ so I could take a picture. (…)

→ ADULT LIFE SUCKS. I used to work in a nursing home. In fact, it’s one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. One of the residents, Patricia, an ex-diplomat who’d travelled the world extensively cried on my final shift upon leaving the dining room in the evening. I said goodnight to her as she was helped to her room and she said, acknowledging the situation, “Well, it’s goodbye”. She burst into tears and I wondered if such a thing had ever happened to me before. Of course it hadn’t. “You’ve been wonderful to us,” she said.

A few weeks before I noticed a plastic pill box left on the gents table nearest the exit and I wondered which of the four it belonged to. I rubbed my finger over the braille of each compartment next to the strangely absorbing typography of MORN, NOON, EVE, BED. All the other tables were occupied by women. The few residents too frail to ever leave their room were also female. One of the gents used to order tomato soup, bread and cheese for every meal. He would barely look up from underneath his blankets and refused to get out of bed except to eat. He never had the TV or the radio on in his room and sometimes he’d stick his fingers down his throat after he’d eaten. He couldn’t wait to die, and went on and on like this. His room was on the top floor of the grand old house and as the two rooms each side of his own remained empty his order was the last I had to take. Tomato soup, bread and cheese. I could see the agony of still being alive in this state on his face each time I entered his room and asked what he wanted. It felt right to ask, but he didn’t ever appreciate my asking.

He stuck his fingers down his throat once more once but instead of being rushed away I noticed through the window of the kitchen door he remained at the table, sick all down his jumper, and the man generally left till last had disappeared. He’d been slightly unwell lately and was the youngest person sat at any table in the dining room. He died that night and in the morning I remember coming down the wide thickly-carpeted stairs from the top floor, where I watched as he was taken away, the thin beige blanket pulled up over his face and head so thoroughly and finally that it seemed to sculpt the shape of that head and the gaping mouth underneath it. Most of the staff and even some of the residents stood around to see him go. I stood likewise, not making a sound, only looking down.

Tomato soup, bread and cheese man had left his pill box on purpose, hoping for something different to happen I guess, one of the carers explained when I mentioned it, smoking absently outside as I unchained my bike to go home. Of course the empty pill box in my pocket had been replaced by the nurse without a second thought from the big box of the things in the storeroom.

This portioned out time interested me, as did the sheer hostility of the staff toward one another and the relative happiness of the majority of the residents. Handing out black coffee to Mrs Eagles, I mentioned this observation and she agreed with such force she needed to put the coffee down on her tray before she could speak. “Yes, of course I have noticed! They are perfectly nice to us, just not to each other.” Each part of the day involving food or drink had its own momentum, and in between seemed stark voids. It surprised me how little the TV in each room seemed to comfort anybody. Some of the residents didn’t appear to be staring at anything at all when I walked in their room, though Mrs Eagles seemed to be staring at everything and wouldn’t dream of switching on the TV in the daytime when there were things going on in the home.

→ PLAYGROUND is an audio recording of children in a school playground on the final day of the summer term, transplanted into the empty playground of a primary in a different village over the duration of the autumn half-term, throughout the morning, lunch and afternoon break periods of a typical school day, Monday–Friday, in bursts of 4–11 seconds.

As distinct as the sonorous horn of a distant train, or the chime of a church bell striking upon the hour, this contextual sound installation explores the tension of presence in absence, sonic routine, confusion and deep-seated human experience. A sense of disorientation came over the village, with one man whose children attended the school telling me: “When I first heard it I thought I was going mad; like something out of a horror film, where at first you’re confused and don’t know what’s going on. I raced back home and asked the kids why they weren’t at school, and began to wonder why I wasn’t at work, before realising something was going on…”

Waiting for the various breaks to play the audio over the course of the day, I sat reading White Noise by Don Delillo, and came across this sentence: There’s no past, present or future outside our own mind. The so-called laws of motion are a big hoax. Even sound can trick the mind.

I realised more and more that there’s something about disrupting established routine and introducing confusion that really interested me.

This video was recorded on 24/12/1999. The next day, I returned to the same spot to record the exact same scene, completely emptied of people or traffic. The footage of both scenes played out side-by-side on TV’s situated in an exhibition of art, entitled: Cold Angels, Jan-Feb 2000. The second tape has been lost. I’ve honestly no idea what I was trying to say here. I guess I just thought it would be interesting. The third and lowest TV playing the white noise seems like a misstep too.

Tracystown, Co. Wexford, Ireland. Published 2001 in local Co. Wexford newspaper. My grandad, Michael Hayes, sat on the right next to last beside May Donnelly in the second row. All now deceased, with no more decisions left to make. All these faces draw me in and I wonder when looking upon this picture if Miss O’Mahony regretted moving at the wrong moment. I can tell you that Michael Hayes wore that expression his entire life, as though present and absorbed but stoic and absent at once. Like no other expression I’ve seen. I find it impossible not to wonder about these lives faded into ancient history, the death and sadnesses in each future. The small victories along the way.

I had a longstanding desire to put together a creative project combining my twin love for music and field recording. I came up with various names for the idea and decided to go with Anthems For Doomed Youth co-opting the Wilfred Owen poem. After drawing a picture of Owen and happy with the ‘branding’ etc., the project lay dormant for a while until I heard that The Libertines had just released an album called Anthems for doomed youth and cross about this I forgot about the idea for a while.

A few months before this I got into a conversation with someone at work, interested in the poetry of Wilfred Owen and I mentioned this drawing. She asked if she could see the picture. I don’t know what I was expecting. I didn’t really think about it. But the bland response seemed to crystallize something in my mind about why I produce the kind of art I produce. I turned this into an art piece → Hi Paul… wondering about creativity and perceptions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ art. Recalling a disagreement with someone else in the same building; a retired doctor who had thrown himself into his art practice upon retirement, who bitterly regretted his decision to pursue medicine over his great passion for art, I became irritated by his positing about a good frame being crucial to a professional-looking picture.

I came across a plastic filing wallet, creased and hopeless; something I saw all the time at work, realising that not only was this perhaps the worst possible way to display anything, but its creases would also distort the light, hindering an unobstructed view of what lay inside.

But of course it didn’t start that way. I wondered about all kinds of situations and wrote to the art department at the local council, which still existed at this time, who advised me that it simply couldn’t be done in the subway I had proposed or anywhere else. It wasn’t an option to interfere with public wayfinding or security. I wrote to other people. I realised the glass element would always be a problem and the decorative element distracting and obvious. Like an interior designer’s idea of what would be a ‘funky’ thing to do in a gritty place. Did it need to be a gritty place? I wondered about the woods for a while until I grew tired of thinking about it knowing there was only one way to put it out of my mind.

I knew someone who lived pretty near some woods who also had a stepladder, so I cycled up and found them in the back garden. They had been out there so long that when I tipped them up passing back through the house ancient rainwater came pouring out from somewhere. Seeing this over his carpet he grabbed my arm and rushed me out the front door with a sudden force that took me by surprise where the rusty water continued to spill along the path. I thanked him, hung the one end over the handlebars whilst holding the other against the seat. I thought it best to take a drill to not muck about and eventually came to a clearing, whereby I immediately took the stepladder to a particular tree determined not to waste any time. Everything I needed was in the bag on my back.

But it wasn’t right. The idea wasn’t right. I didn’t want to leave glass to be busted up within days, just leaving the frame hanging there for some reason and broken glass amongst the leaves. I took it down and walked the ladders back, thanked him again, and we both agreed on a beer at some unspecified future point.

I managed to convince a place in Stokes Croft to lend some stepladders, and headed back up and again set about installing the security mirrors with bendable Acrylic instead of glass without any delay as soon as I arrived in the busy underpass. The drill became so hot and overworked trying to penetrate that concrete I thought it would die before I could finish and I began looking at the shops around wondering who could lend me a drill. Nobody stopped to look or asked what I was doing. A few days before I bought cans of Gleaming Pink and Acid Green spray paint from the shop opposite and spoke to the owner about what I intended to do. When I moved to the South West, the underpass, next to the bus station, was one of the first places I came across. It had an excellent record shop. I returned the ladders and headed back to take some pictures when a cleaner came along and parked his cart underneath the mirrors to take a look. “What do you think of these things?” I asked, camera in hand. Seeing only their function, perhaps, he answered, “Complete and utter waste of time”.