"....I am driving with a friend to the then derelict section of the Isle of Dogs docklands in East London to recover abandoned metal and iron for sculpture. I park the car on the side of a service road and we set off on foot down an overgrown path. This warehouse has not been used since the early 80s – roofs have collapsed, trees grow out of cracks in cement sidewalks and grey asphalt pavement; wood support beams, long rotten crumble into dust. Inside an old massive white painted flour mill, complete with nine story silos we enter a staff canteen on the sixth floor – the woodgrain formica topped tables and attached orange bucket seat chairs are still intact although beneath a quarter-inch of lunar-grey dust.

The menu of the day is still set for June 4, 1983 written on the chalkboard as if it had been written the previous day. On another floor a leather-bound ledger lies open, abandoned on a table. Yellowing pages account for flour shipments coming into the facility dating back to the 1930s all in neat penned letters on lined pages.

This area is an echo and a melange of times and places. Outside the mill are large two-storey petroleum tanks with Vietnamese petroleum company painted on the outside–I realize later that this is a remnant of Hue, Vietnam in 1968 as depicted by Stanley Kubrick in Full Metal Jacket. The props now are also covered in creeping vines and almost vanishing amidst a jungle of undergrowth.

All of this is a picture of human inertia pushing forward and then suddenly releasing its grip on buildings and land and entropy, or nature’s inertia coming in to fill the vacuum. The result is an image of a middle world – icons, remnants of human activity become echoes as the elements bombard human structures into the earth; what is left is half-buried and indeterminate and formless."*

Such complexity is the inspirations for my current series, Middleworlds - which examines structure as it reverts to new forms losing its readability and recognized purpose. Buildings, city centers, docklands all submit to external inertia and the human erasure begins. Structures inadvertently become monuments to human absense and as such highlight the relationship between ourselves and structures outside of us.

*(excerpt from "A journey to an abandoned city" Les Joynes 2006)