This project is based on the concept of the Sublime. For me it is a sense of longing mixed with trepidation, of desire for something mixed with a sense of uncertainty or danger.

Thinking about my own experience, as a parent the greatest day to day fear is of something happening to my children.  My daughters are of the age to be beginning to forge their own independence, with some of my eldest’s friends allowed to ‘hang out’ with others in various public spaces.  Whilst at my aunt’s recently she told me that an unexplored World War Two bomb had been found in the woods where we used to play as children and I distinctly remember as a child seeing a bra hung from a tree and wondering what had happened to its owner.  It is the attractiveness of these places that are so desirous to youngsters with their ability to stir up mixed emotions of being grown up coupled with the possibility of a sense of the unknown, even danger and the parents’ over-imaginative visions of terrible accidents and abduction that I have chosen to explore with this project.

These images present the places children and youths like to play and congregate independently, the places where they can be free of parental influence for a short time. Such locations are beautiful in their own way by being desirable and exciting not only for the escape from adult control but also the very fact that parents often do not really like their children playing there coupled with the sense of unknown danger.  The sign at the railway line wants of the danger of trains, a lone man walks across the deserted car park, a crudely made rope swing resembles a noose, all alluding to the fear of the parents and hint at the possibility of something going wrong.  The black circles resemble holes that allow the viewer to insert their own imaginary fears and thus the work becomes more personal.