Roadside (2011-12)

The Roadside series documents my encounters with roadkill while cycling the country lanes of Norfolk and Suffolk.  Parts of the bike (most often a pedal) feature in all of these photographs.  It’s not always easy to convey the close and serious attention involved in the work  when presenting what some viewers might regard as gratuitously gory imagery.  The bike’s inclusion in these photographs therefore served, I hope, as a makeshift framing device that at least helped to mark each image as an actual encounter with a particular creature’s lost life.  Six pieces from the Roadside series were included in the extensive survey exhibition Arche Noah: Über Tier und Mensch in der Kunst at the Museum Ostwall in Dortmund, Germany, in 2014-15.  With work from over a hundred artists ranging from Picasso to Beuys to Abramović and Gursky, it remains the most ambitious animal-themed museum show of modern and contemporary art yet to have been staged.