Lliswerry (as the locals spell it) is an area of the Newport map that is largely made up from housing estates, council estates and sheltered accommodation; housing, housing and more housing. If you look at a map of the area in some detail and wonder the rows of houses you will on occasion find with the odd secret garden of green, a drainage ditch, Play Park or a simple ambiguous patch of grass. These little spaces where nature exists, in however small a part, alongside human domesticity, at its suburban best, and the concrete that encases it, have for me a special irony and attraction.
What I see from these spaces is the way, this otherwise crowded and cramped environment, has been divided. People seem to have been given or have claimed a space and then walled it off physically and in their own minds.
The people that live in such a place seem drained of community spirit perhaps by oppressive nature of the very artificial environment that has been created for them.
For me there is still a beauty and poignancy in these spaces that separate people in such a crampt community, the walls fences, grass, roads and little spaces that fill the wholes in such a society.
I also find the way people in an environment that seems to almost tangibly depersonalise its occupants in uniformed concrete grey.
To me the landscape and environment in which people and importantly the way they treat that environment can allude to the identity and mentality of its inhabitants. The state of the environment and the state of the occupants runs in parallel, both effecting the other.
I have worked in consistent light at consistent times of days and similar weather conditions and on varying days of the week. I wanted to give myself time to become attuned to the routine of Liswerry in a manageable chunk of the day. In this way I hoped to achieve a consistency in the presence of people with in the spaces and frame them within their own environment.