A recreation of Butts Road during the Big Freeze of 1962, set-dressed and inhabited by the hyper local community with stories gathered in Pleck and Caldmore. A nurse holds a child in an upstairs window. The Punjabi grocers, Singh & Sons, is lit and open. The Rainbow Cafe has a party going on inside. Factory silhouettes loom in the distance. A solitary figure stands in the snow, looking to the heavens. Shot during Storm Goretti.
Paths You Walk is a body of large-format photographs and a three-part film built from oral testimony gathered in Caldmore, Palfrey, Pleck, and The Butts. Constructed sets dressed against the Walsall archive. The same ground, sixty years apart.
Each image is the work of three to four days of preparation: deep consultation with the families whose stories are carried in the frame, period dressing of a real residential street, vintage vehicles and signage hauled in, and a single staged tableau exposed against the live Walsall weather. In January 2026 the snow came, and kept falling, through the final night of the shoot. After the Storm is the image that came out of it.
The film series at the heart of the work, Three Cantos, sits alongside the photographs and the period props in the gallery. The exhibition is supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund and produced by Reimagining Industrial Migratory Stories CIC. Currently exhibiting at The New Art Gallery Walsall to 12 July 2026. View the Cantos →
The image is built from a story that emerged three times during testimony gathering in Caldmore, Palfrey, and Pleck: the recurrence of suicide connected to forbidden love. Cultural lines crossed, rumbled the moment before a decision that cannot be undone.
Kiran, a Punjabi builder from the local community, plays the eldest of six brothers who came to England from the Punjab to work at Barton’s factory, leaving the youngest brother behind. The youngest was then murdered in an ambush over a land dispute in the aftermath of Partition.
By firmly planting his artistic project in the working class, post-industrial, communities of South Asian heritage in the Black Country, Dosanjh has taken on the task of creating a new form of 'settler art'.
Hammad Nasar, New Art Exchange, 2023