Northern Adventures

St Pancras Station

Whilst St Pancras was shrouded in dust-sheets during renovations, I explored the building with a view towards a work using xenon projections onto the sheets.

The many statues of women on the façade were in various stages of decrepitude with missing and disfiguring facial features. With twisted echoes of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, I decided to photograph these statues alongside women in a local home for the elderly. I asked women of approximately the same age as these sculptures to pose in the same way but ironically they were remarkably unblemished and preserved compared to the statues with their scarred facial features.

I also used electronic microscope photography of the stone and skin as well as magic lantern imagery from the Museum of Moving Image to complete an observation on changing materiality and technologies. The magic lantern images were the only projections known when the station was built and the women were babies.