Peter Day


Roadworks
Dec 1997
   
05 Feb 1998
07 Feb 1998
08 March 1998
09 May 1998

This series of images were taken over a twelve-month period. Roadworks reflects a continued interest in the banal, the everyday and the non photographic moment. In these images a visual analysis of a place, space and time is constructed through re-visiting and serial documentation of the same space. Each film as far as possible represents the same set of recordings and the same choreography. The road photographed is/was directly outside 9 Sandford Walk Exeter, literally a half yard from the window and this project was the beginning of several works recording my life at this address.

In 1998 I wrote the following to accompany the images:

Monumental and sculptural, the road represents something of what we see as concrete and indestructible. In our lives it symbolises often, security, familiarity and thus topographical nostalgia. We need the concrete and the real, to give substance to the ethereal and ephemeral, and yet this road outside my home, although it stands for a hundred years or more, also represents transience and now my temporality, in my relation to it both physically in my mode of living and representationally, in my mode of presentation. I now have a specific relationship with it in attempting to structuralise ideas about representation, its re-presentation and how it has become represented in the images I have created. (Artist’s statement 1998)