A Metaphysical Survey of British Dwellings, 2010

Shot entirely in a mock-up town, built in 2003, to train the Firearms and Public Order Units of the UK’s Metropolitan Police, this series deals with urbanism in all its contradictoriness and ambiguity.

This ultra-realistic specialist training centre is not just a simulacrum of contemporary British towns, it is also a metaphor for the modern asocial city. Nothing moves in or out of these buildings.

The urban fabric fades into the twilight, forcing us to fill in the absences that the night relentlessly exposes.

An ambiguous game of identity and relation is played out, a game which encompasses an enigmatic assemblage of everyday life, transmission and flow, dislocation, bewilderment and solitude.

These images depend on photography’s inherit tendency to make each space believable, but there is a disturbing suggestion that all is not what it seems. This process of slow revelation and sense of temporal manipulation is crucial to the work.