2020 Series

A new series of photographic works taken in nightclubs and at events across Europe.

Made during the lockdowns of 2020, this series of untitled photographs draw from a decade of low-fidelity mobile footage taken in European nightclubs, often fleeting and in the moment. Each features a flash of light cut out in digital pattern, transformed into a void. With many of us having not set foot in spaces like these for almost a year, the low quality and anonymity of these images remind us of the distance to our memories in these spaces, each with a new-found precarity and vulnerability.

The first two photographs ‘Main Stage’ and ‘Hope Works’ are brighter abstracts, showing ethereal shapes cutting through sections of crowd and forming a number of digital patterns. ‘Blend’ - an amalgamation of several images - creates additional pattern and texture through collage, the relative brightness or darkness in tone feeding through each layer.

In ‘Walthamstow’ a circular void is set against a flat background, the heads of two figures coming just into view. These figures then move in and out in ‘Tilburg’ and ‘The Cause’, touching the void with definitions given through tone or binary pattern. Closer figures become more identifable, but retain a ghostly presence embedded in the wider image, bleeding into figures behind them.

In ‘The Cellar’ no persons are discernible, a flash of light simply filling an empty space and creating a phantom-like halo. The Cellar closed in 2019, with many nightclubs and event spaces around the UK, and beyond, facing a similar fate during the coronavirus pandemic.

Untitled (Main Stage), 2020
Altered mobile phone video still
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Untitled (Hope Works), 2020
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Untitled (Blend), 2020
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Untitled (Walthamstow), 2020
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Untiled (Tilburg), 2020
Altered mobile phone image
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Untitled (The Cause), 2020
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Untitled (The Cellar), 2020
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