Unit For

‘Unit For’ (2018) comprises a series of images, text and accompanying soundtrack that describes myself and artist Sara Bradbury’s three week occupation of an industrial space – made available for artists to develop, show and produce work in – and our developing relationship with a homeless woman sleeping in the doorway. The film exposes the raw beginnings of our thought processes, half made work and abandoned ideas wrought within an increasingly unsettling atmosphere. Its format deliberately echoes the simplicity of a presentation or the ubiquitous low-tech social media ‘info-docs’ that depict second hand experiences through diluted or partial representations of complex situations designed to feed off of or stimulate emotional responses. This work questions the artists’ role within an environment of conspicuous poverty and an increasingly middle class art world that is in danger of becoming insular and self-serving. I wanted to question the relationship between artwork, societal situations within which art is produced and the notion of artistic privilege. This wasn’t a game. We were not artists working in isolation in an ivory tower imbued with gifted foresight or some out-dated myth of genius. We were as visible to the woman outside as she was to us. We affected each other. This is what happened in that space.