Unfixed

Out of scale, and strangely inappropriate, eight charcoal wall drawings form the basis of this gallery-less exhibition.

These images show how to build a home darkroom under the stairs, in a spare room or in a bathroom – and they appear here in the spaces where the actual equipment would have been assembled.

On the walls are the enlargers, developing trays, safety lights and timers used to produce black and white photographs – the equipment of a disappearing process has re-appeared on the walls of a deserted top floor flat.

Inspired by the kind of diagrams that used to introduce any ‘how to be a photographer manual’, this exhibition represents a vanishing space: the asocial, even antisocial, space of domestic, analogue photography.

But this isn’t simply a melancholic journey into an out-dated world. Here, these drawn diagrams and images of equipment not only re-present, but also present themselves. As for the future, they will disappear from the walls of the flat as the new occupant moves in, but will continue to live on as photographs themselves.

Of course, many artists have been interested in haunted, disused spaces. Here, though, that space becomes a site for a new image-life. For now, these drawings inhabit an in-between space, but it is their appearance, disappearance and new life as photographs that gives the work an existence beyond the exhibition.