Tell Your Mum People Die On The London Eye (2009)
This was a 9-month work which incorporated ritual and performance. I went to the London Eye across from the Houses of Parliament twice a week and asked a tourist to take my picture with Big Ben in the background. By doing this, I not only relinquished control of the photograph to someone else but retained the behind-the-camera presence of the tourists after they returned home.
This project is part of an ongoing theme in my work of using urban spaces in ways which they were not intended to be used in order to subvert pre-existing pathways and conditioned movements through the city. This repeated action is both atypical of Londoners’ usage of the city and that of the tourists who frequent this location.
The work additionally comments on my own uncertain nomadic status in London – not a tourist anymore nor fully at home – and explores notions of how certain accepted behaviours (such as asking to have one’s picture taken) are location-specific. In a pattern typical of tourist areas within dense urban spaces, the turnover of people in the area creates an anonymity in which my action becomes a regular presence which is wholly unnoticed by the shifting population occupying the space. |
