Two hands, three toes and a finger

I have a small cluster of scars on the back of my head. They come from a moment of childhood play turning suddenly serious when my head was banged against the pebble-dash wall of the house I grew up in. It is a family story that has been told and retold, embellished and smoothed over time, but the wall itself has never really left me. It was one of the so called ‘boot houses’ of north Birmingham, shonky social housing made of cheap concrete poured around defective steel. Long before I had the language for it, that house taught me that buildings are not neutral. That collision
between flesh, memory and architecture is where my work begins and is a way I've started to think about my practice.

This paper proposes that growing up in a defective house has shaped not just what I look at as an artist, but how I think. I will use this childhood anecdote as a way into a broader discussion of how personal memory, family history and civic architecture intersect in my practice. From photographing redundant factories and libraries to working with industrial objects and sites that are being erased, repurposed or carefully rebranded, my work returns again and again to places where official stories
sit uneasily against material reality and I’ll touch on some of the very first photographs I made at art school in Wolverhampton, through to work made as recently as this week.

The paper will argue for the value of starting from minor, bodily experiences, scars, knocks, accidents, as a legitimate form of architectural and cultural knowledge. These small injuries offer a way of understanding how power, care and neglect are felt long before they are named, and how they continue to shape artistic thinking long after the buildings themselves have gone.