Personal Work: Duality

Over the summer I started working on a documentary typography series based around fatal car accident sites. Northern Ireland is statistically the most dangerous place to drive within the U.K with more deaths on the road per person than England, Wales or Scotland.

Growing up in a small town outside Belfast I frequently made the journey to Belfast along a dual carriage way which is well know for being  particularly dangerous with a huge number of road fatalities every year. I remember as a youngster staring out at the floral tributes, which were left at the exact spot in which the accident occurred. More recently I looked at these floral tributes in a different way. The tributes marked both the point at which someone died and is mourned. It also marks the point at which a soul, life force, energy, neurons or whatever else you want to call it, left this five-sense reality and moved to another, hence the title Duality.

Here are the first three images of the series, I have tried to keep a link with all the images by maintaining the a constant horizontal line running through the first third of the frame to give the feeling of viewing these sites as you would should you be driving up the road.

One of the interesting things this project has thrown up, is the difficulty of making images in and around Belfast which do not maintain some elements of it’s “troubled” past. We see in the first image that as well as the floral tribute, there is a Glasgow Rangers F.C football kit, a team, which has ties to the Protestant community of N.Ireland. This can also be seen in the third image in which just at the left of the frame in the foreground is a red, white and blue painted lamppost, which is used by particular communities to both mark territory and display the areas British-ness.

I am not making any comment of the religious and sectarian elements associated with N.Ireland but I am not going to deny it either. I suppose the comparison could be drawn with John Duncan’s work as these elements are as much a part of N.Ireland as the crash sites and the floral tributes.

This is very much a work in progress so constructive crit is welcome. (Not about the colours though I know they need a tweek.)