Excavating Utopia

An exciting collaboration with ten photographers from across the UK that culminated in an exhibition as part of Look11 International Photography Festival.

“whereas the highly rational societies of the renaissance felt the need to create utopias, we of our times must create fables” Francis Alys

: bath

: telephone contacts

: Grandmother’s clock

: London Soldiers

: Toy TV

: Twin Lens Reflex

: Kermy

: Grandad’s Gnome

: Best Tea Set

: Eau de Toilette

: Mould

: Pincushion

: Christopher Lee

: Memorabilia

: Rababa

: Trapped

: exhibition excavating utopia

: exhibition excavating utopia 2

: exhibition postcard

: exhibition wallpaper

Excavating Utopia is a collaborative project based on the life of an ordinary street …Park Road …but this Park Road is all over the country depending on where the participants are working and becomes an imaginary street populated by imaginary residents that have the same pressures and joys as ‘real’ people.

The work brings together all the threads from all the Park Roads into a coherent project that reflects on the nature of life in the UK at this time of stress and change.

The work also questions the validity of photography in terms of seeing is believing and that all photography by it’s very nature is a subjective truth (untruth?) but in this case any semblance of supposed truth is removed from the work in that what the viewer with unwittingly see is a total fabrication of places, people, histories and events.