HUMPTY DUMPTY.
2024. 148mm x 211mm. Perfect bound. 82 pages. Edition of 50. £20.
Published and available via: @yourlocalpublication (link in my bio)
A very special project to me. 10 years of photographs from every corner of England, 2013-2023.
It’s a playful exploration of English identity and its fragility and fragmenting nature. It’s hard to agree on anything in our current time but regardless of your political views or social standing, one thing is agreed: England is broken. It’s the one universal truth we have in a time when truth feels the least universal thing possible. 2013-2023 is a point in our history in which this universal truth came to exist. Through austerity, Brexit, a pandemic and a change in monarch, what was once bubbling under the surface is flying high like a flag in the summer of a World Cup.
Using the universally known rhyme of Humpty Dumpty I look to personify the country and simplify our predicament. We fell down and we lay broken on the floor. The layout speaks to this very idea, the photographs are fragments of this country taped back together. Furthermore, the tape is used to resemble the very thing that represents and divides us, the flag.
The project was born from the flag. When I used to see it, it made me feel deeply uncomfortable. It had come to represent something far from its purpose. A nationalistic tool. Like our predicament with being broken, this isn’t something we can run from or ignore. If we are to be put together again then we must start to reclaim these things. It’s in this subversive nature that I use the flag.
This ultimately is the message of the project, we must be put back together again. But maybe it’s not the kings horses or kings men that do this, maybe it’s us, each other.
Big thanks to @bradgilbert_ & @yourlocalpublication and as always to @nasgnb for helping me see.
Humpty Dumpty
@yourlocalpublication
5 moments 1 idea. Fragments of moments across different times and from North, South, East and West, all bound to one double page spread. I took all these photographs of moments of England across 2013-2023 with the idea of postcards of England, fragments of authentic identity. It wasn’t Big Ben or the Angel of the North but rather postcards of the England you might miss. For the longest time I didn’t really know what to do with them, until the rhyme. Humpty Dumpty came then the tape came, the tape bound all these fragments together to create this one thing. An expression of a fragmented England
Humpty Dumpty
@yourlocalpublication
It would be impossible to create a project all about England without some reference to alcohol. If England were to have veins they would run ice cold with lager. Pint? The inevitable question suitable for any occasion. Alcohol has been romanticised in this country to the point we’ve forgotten its destruction and harm. Good? Bad? Healthy? Unhealthy? All I know is that I’ve spent too many days staring into the empty abyss of a pint glass. CHEERS.
Humpty Dumpty @yourlocalpublication
This is an image from 2021 at Upper Telegraph Hill park. It was post lockdown and having spent a year watching daily death tolls rise and being labelled as vulnerable throughout the pandemic, this situation scared me. I remember looking at each person as some sort of harbinger of death and a having a deep guilt of this proximity to others. As I sat there longer and longer these feelings faded, I realised our intrinsic need as humans to be in community and connection with one another, it became a nice moment of feeling at one with the world again.
Last week, I released this project Humpty Dumpty. A decade of watching the country fall to pieces, this week saw the culmination of these very ideas.
This project was born from seeing flags of England flown high and wondering why it made me uncomfortable. It made me uncomfortable because it was often accompanied with an idea of nostalgia. What’s been bubbling away behind this facade of a flag over years and years, is now clear as day. What were once shouts of “go home” are now straight up acts of violence towards anybody not white. What was once labelled as xenophobia is now straight up white supremacy. The past week has shown us this clearly in all its horror and it’s sickening. We welcomed Ukrainian refugees with open arms and open homes and we all know why. Its about being white or not being white.
What we are seeing isn’t simply “far right thuggery” but instead terrorism with white supremacy as its ideology, it’s as serious as it gets. For every one terrorist on the streets cultivating this violence and hatred, we have 20 more sat at home cheering it on. What is happening isn’t isolated and it isn’t a small problem. If the terrorism seen this weekend is a product, the manufacturers are far from the perpetrators. These ideas have a root and it’s historic, systemic and complex.
This is a problem for every single one of us, it’s essential that we stand tall in the face of it. It’s an attack on humanity itself and the notion of equality. The Britain I’ve come to love is one of diversity and inclusion. White supremacy is an ideology that is heinous and evil to its very core, a society built on equality must be our most common goal and this dream is one more valuable than anything. Our reaction needs to be calling it out for what it is and it must be more than just simply putting these people in prison. It’s the equivalent of brushing it under the carpet. We need real dialogues and action. Whether we like it or not, we all inhabit this stupid fucking infuriating island, it very simply lies broken on the floor, we cant just put it back together because it was always broken. We must build anew with equality at its very core. It’s a time to stand tall.
