Places We Used to Smoke

Places We Used To Smoke is a body of work created in my home town of Sunderland, in the north of England. A meditation on youth, environment and the emergence of self. Places We Used To Smoke is an exploration of location, both physical and temporal. How does a particular place shape identity or affect a sense of belonging? What does it mean to be a product of your environment? Adolescence is fraught with complex changes, both physical and psychological. A time when features and limbs grow in disproportion. When personalities, sensibilities and views of the world are formed. An often confusing paradox of wanting to belong to a group while becoming an individual within the world. The search for popularity at odds with feelings of alienation or otherness. Places We Used To Smoke was completed by working with a group of teenagers from my former school St. Aidan’s, an all-boys catholic secondary. It was the first time I had been back to the school in over twenty years. The scenes, portraits and details were constructs drawn from my own memories, staged in environments that held personal resonance. I took three visits to the school over the course of a year to complete the work. Everything was shot within a one kilometre radius between the school grounds and my childhood home. These are the locations my friends and I spent our own adolescence, from the school yard to the local park to the redbrick back lanes. Despite the specifics of location, the aim was to portray a timeless universal experience. Using the current students as proxies, the work reimagines some of my own recollections from youthhood. Play-fighting, climbing obstacles, scrawling on walls, eating crisps, playing football, smoking cigarettes, killing time. The mischief and modes of behaviour, the banality and adrenaline, in that brief period of time between childhood and adulthood. Places We Used to Smoke incorporates stills, motion film and sound installation.