Imprints

As those who know me (and many who don't) are aware that in late November 2020 I was caught in the crossfire of rival gangs, and shot as I stood outside the Cat & Mutton pub at the north end of Broadway Market. My life ended on the pavement in an area I had always felt safe and had called home for 3 years at the time the bullet was fired. In a dramatic twist of fate the police and HEMS team of paramedics were close by and against the odds were able to bring me back. Since then this location continues to hold a strong significance for me and in the past 6 months I have started to explore my relationship with this area through my art practice; drawing, writing, and taking photographs. 

Understanding my relationship with the geography of Broadway Market is inexplicably linked to the trauma I experienced there and the tangled mess of people and events that lead me to be standing in the flightline of that shot. The person that pulled the trigger and the gangs whose relationship to the same land under our feet was so contentious that it has been exploding into extreme violence for decades. The escalating gentrification the area has experienced in the past 30 years, as social housing was either sold off to those that could afford it or left to rot before being demolished. The fragmentation of communities that have made their homes and livelihoods along that street and in nearby social housing.  Postcode wars of the 90s, and as I dig around the roots, stretching further and further back to the rubble from which social housing was built from; a global war that bombed homes into ruins during the Blitz. Deeper and deeper and we end up in the emerging textile industry of the 1700s, and would define the area and the bodies of its inhabitants for over a century. Through time Broadway Market is interwoven with craft, industry, homebuilding and violence.

This project hopes to give some structure and form to the sprawling threads of social histories that lay just below the surface, sunk into the mud and concrete, in an area that has so profoundly imprinted itself on my corporeal being. I have been lucky enough to receive support from the arts council in the form of a DYCP (Developing Your Creative Practice) grant to support my development throughout this project,  Through this programme of research and exploration I want to develop a new set of skills that would otherwise be unavailable to me as a tetraplegic artist, while locating the events that lead to my dramatic injury and recovery at the centre of my creative practice. This will be a foundational process of healing through learning and making contact with the environment that nearly killed me, nurturing a new artistic self to emerge while forming new roots and collaborative relationships with people in my local community.