Endz of the World · 2025 · Artist film, 9 minutes · Chelsea Space, Chelsea College of Arts
Over two years of my UAL 20/20 residency at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, I went looking for the hidden histories of workers who came to the Black Country across centuries. The gallery’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial paintings, Butler Bayliss, Lockwood, Eccleston, romanticise the furnaces and leave out the men who fed them. I wanted to look at the same ground from the other end of the labour line.
I worked with software engineers to build a database from the gallery’s public-domain collection scans and mid-twentieth-century images of empire workers. We tagged everything and built a dedicated composite image-making system. The system rendered images from prompts I wrote, pulled from research and local testimony. Visions of the spaces between histories that I couldn’t reach with a camera.
The film runs nine minutes. It was screened at Chelsea Space during a programme of artist film events in summer 2025, alongside the sculpture and print exhibition Endz of the World, Coded Furnaces at Wolverhampton Art Gallery. The wider residency body, photopolymer etchings, sculpture, is documented on the works page.