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 trained a dedicated machine learning model. The model made 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.