A hinged cranium and a sprung jaw..

Resident Alien. Part 3

 

There were a couple of blips in my criminal history that my lawyers were concerned about. One included a charge for trafficking in human body parts. A charge which was later dropped, but I was told could still register on a background check and would need careful explanation if it came up in my immigration interview. This occurred while I was living in Norway in 2001 when someone in the UK was interested in acquiring a print from my tarot card series (Death) and proposed a trade for a human skull in return. This was an offer I could not refuse and the exchange was made and I was detained by the authorities when I went to pick it up. It was indeed a real human skull, but with a hinged cranium and a sprung jaw it was soon determined to be a teaching aid so the charges were dropped and I was allowed to keep it. When I returned to the UK a couple of years later I wrapped the skull in a jumper and put it in my hand luggage and took it with me on the flight back without incident or delay. The skull is still in the UK today, packed in a box and stored in a barn, amid sawdust, cobwebs and gloom, and has since been weathered by 15 years of seasons in the mist of an Iron Age hill fort. It waits now, silently in the same old darkness for my return journey back to the dust.

With tomorrow set as the end date..

Resident Alien. Part 2.

At the time of making this series (between 2008-2012), my life was under the scrutiny of the US department of homeland security. I was applying for residency to establish a life in the US together with my American wife. Our initial procrastination in getting the green card ball rolling had meant my tourist visa had expired and I had been living without any legal documentation for almost 2 years. It was under these circumstances that we lived, worked and traveled and they were the psychological conditions in which all the photographs, now called, Resident Alien, were made. It was an unsettling time for us newlyweds, we couldn’t really put down any roots, everything was in doubt and we had to be strong and we had to have hope, but I felt somehow like I was living on borrowed time and the game would be up for me any day now. 

So with tomorrow set as the end date, we quickly learned to make the most of today and we began to explore the America that I had recently landed right in the center of, in Kansas, and say yes to everything in the meantime. Many of these early road trips are documented here in this blog and it was the reason why I first set it up, as a travel journal. It was a time of both high anxiety and great adventure and it was full of the first time for things. It was my first time in the USA. It was my first time using a digital camera. It was my first attempt to shoot in colour with any real commitment and they would later be the first images that I uploaded to the internet. It’s also to be noted that all of these first times had their own tree of related first times attached to them. It was an intense initiation into my new “as seen on TV” life in America and I was very much the outsider looking in.

Buried under a decade..

Resident Alien. Part 1.

For about a month I have been keeping a journal for a project I have started working on. It is sort of a process log and keeping this log it has since become part of that process. By writing about this project I have had the chance to consider it more carefully than I might have otherwise done and the process has been insightful. These insights are now helping to determine the shape of the project. I have already made several entries into this log, but in order to begin sharing it I have to first introduce it, give it some background and context. Please consider this, and whatever I am going to say next, as that introduction.

In 2012 I had an idea for a photobook, but life got in the way and the idea got pushed to one side and then buried under a decade. It was a collection of photos I'd made during the first 4 years I’d spent in the USA, beginning in 2008 and ending in 2012 with a change of camera. In all this time, as my life unfolded in ways I could never have predicted, my thoughts would sometimes return to this work and I promised myself when I finally arrived in a space to give it the focused attention it needed that I would try and honor it. How I was going to honor it exactly I did not yet know, but I was always having these drifting nebulous ideas for it and over time a few of these ideas began to gravitate to one another until, just recently, a sort of conception happened and I suddenly, in a flash, saw the whole completed thing floating in my head. 

In the decade of separation from this work I did not have access to it at all, but my memory of it was always strong and alive in my imagination and I found, through some kind of bedraggled remote viewing, I could work on it and it became an important part of my creative inner life and general sense of grounding. At other times when I’d think about this work I would wonder if it was even relevant anymore as so much time had passed since its making. It was in those moments that I’d realize, that was just me thinking in terms of it having an audience instead of what it really was, an object of my own heart's desire that I wanted to bring into being for myself. Why? because death is always coming and all the witnesses to the making of the photographs are now part of a parallel universe that I can no longer reach, unless..