In 2017, following my exhibition Mathematics at PhotoEspana, Madrid, followed in 2018 at Camden Art Centre, and the launch of the accompanying publication, I began making new work in Finland, Estonia, Slovenia and the UK, experimenting with a new super high resolution camera. This allowed the printing of large prints with significant detail, which, when allied to colour and form, provided key information in the prints otherwise unavailable.

Also, around this time, my mother’s health began to deteriorate. Then in her late 80’s, she seemed to lose interest in eating, and I had to brace myself for her death which took place in June 2019.

The photographs I was making during these years began to suggest to me a ‘compass of apprehension’ for events to come, that broadened out far beyond any purely personal context. By this I mean that, while I was thinking about my mother’s impending death, I was also increasingly preoccupied by a profound sense that our collective way of life was somehow going to undergo radical change.

The word I came to associate with this extended moment of anticipation of suspension or deferral was Lacuna. This word, which comes originally from the Latin for ditch, gap or lagoon, has over time acquired various meanings in English usage, including an hiatus, or discontinuity.

In early 2018 I travelled to South India with the intention of making photographs which drew energy from some of the modern tensions between spiritual, and rational or scientific knowledge. However, on returning to the UK, I was forced to concede that the works made in India were actually a continuation of those photographs I had made in those other countries mentioned above during this time of anxiety for the future, as if this theme was insisting on its importance. What really happened of course, was Covid.

In 2020 while considering these works and how to share them, I was invited by the Pollock Krasner Foundation to submit an application for funding. My application for a substantial sum was successful. I had applied for funding to make new work that followed on directly from the Lacuna works, to make new photographs in the UK and across Europe to the Russian border which accessed energy from a more focused apprehension about a wider conflict in Europe.

My wife Urve is Estonian, and for 20 years we have been making journeys to that country which has an eastern border with Russia, and where we have friends and relatives. Discussions there over the years have inevitably involved thinking about the possibility of Russia reinvading the country (they incorporated it into the USSR from 1941, and in 1942 Urve’s Grandfather was shot by them, and occupied it until 1991) and further incursions into Europe.

These new works were made in the UK, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Crete and Estonia, and imagine a time perhaps not too far into the future when our way of life, even the whole post war political architecture of Europe has changed very significantly. As of this moment of writing, recent international political events have done nothing to undermine the direction of travel of these two interdependent photographic series. They have not yet been published or exhibited.

I very much want to find the right publisher for this work, and I had commissioned a text to support a publication by Alistair Robinson, who completed it only having seen the jpegs on screen, and then after visiting my Peckham studio in October 2025 and seeing the actual prints of both series, felt he wanted to rewrite the whole essay. We feel that publishing both essays in a book with the works, before and after, might set up a very interesting tension and be extremely illuminating.

London, February 2026