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Shows, walks, open calls and other news.
I’ve spent the past few weeks setting up a print shop for the photographs I took while circling London on foot over the past year.
This first selection of 24, Volume One: Circling, is mostly from the London Outer Orbital Path, the Capital Ring and the Jubilee Greenway, taken on my dad’s and my granddad’s film cameras. Most come in three sizes, framed or unframed. The shop runs on creativehub Print Drops, and the prints are made by theprintspace. More to come. Visit the shop
If there’s a particular photograph you’d like as a print, please do get in touch.
The photographs come from Solvitur Ambulando, my project for the MA Photography Practice at Goldsmiths. It’s now listed alongside other photography graduates’ work on Source Graduate Photography Online.
For the second year running, I took part in War Child presents Secret 7”.
Seven tracks, a hundred sleeves each, seven hundred one-off covers, auctioned with no names attached. Nobody knows who made what, or which track is inside, until the record is in the buyer’s hands. It’s a lovely format, and 100% of proceeds go to War Child.
All 700 sleeves were shown at 180 Studios from 19 to 30 August, and auctioned online until 2 September. Mine was for Gabrielle’s Out of Reach, using a photograph from the Capital Ring. Secret 7”
I’m currently reflecting on almost a year of walking in and around London – new places, familiar ones seen differently, and a stronger sense of place after more than a decade here.
I selected several routes as a reliable structure for taking photographs each week while I was on the MA Photography Practice at Goldsmiths: the London Outer Orbital Path, the Capital Ring, the Jubilee Greenway and the City of London boundary. Four loops, each one smaller than the last, and all different in feel. Walking alone, with a camera.
Each of the routes is divided into sections, which came with the added bonus of riding the London transport network more extensively than I ever have. The end of one section is the start of the next, so each station gets used twice – once to travel home from, once to return to a week later.
Alongside them I took part in two walks organised by Ultra Challenge, the Winter Walk and the first half of the London 2 Brighton. Continuous walks, with a focus on connecting with others.
Solvitur Ambulando: It Is Solved by Walking was on show at the MA Photography Practice degree show, in the Professor Stuart Hall Building at Goldsmiths, University of London, from 16 to 19 July.
Two Kodak slide projectors are the centrepiece, showing photographs from the walks on circular carousels – the circular trays echo the circular routes. They run slightly out of step, so the pairings on the wall keep changing and are never quite fixed; sometimes the two images speak to each other, sometimes they don’t.
Alongside them are two photo rails with quieter images from home and family life – no faces, just traces: feet sticking out of a pram, a den in the hallway, shoes left in an odd formation. To the right is mark making from the boys directly on the wall. I had turned the projectors to face it so they could trace the photographs and connect with them, rather than just look. There’s also a hand-bound book: six short stories told through images, each one a signature, stitched together.
The projectors point back to a slower way of sharing pictures, a few people in a room taking time over them, set against the way images live now, as data we mostly glance at and rarely hold.
As with the interim show, the photographs were taken on my dad’s and my granddad’s film cameras, then processed and digitised on a copy stand. This time I transposed them back onto slide film using the film writer in the fine art department (running off a 1998 PC). The film was processed by Rapid Eye and Aperture Printing, and I cut and mounted the slides by hand, in glassless mounts from Process Supplies in Farringdon. The black and white images went onto Adox Scala, and they look better than I could have hoped.
Thanks to all who came, and to those I studied alongside, whose work made it what it was. It’s been a wonderful year. Returning to university after fifteen years brought focus to an art practice that had always been there but never had much shape. I plan to keep developing the work I’ve been making.
Goldsmiths has featured Solvitur Ambulando in its degree show coverage, with a Q&A about the walks behind it. Read the feature










