“What can we know of the world? What quantity of space can our eyes hope to take in between our birth and our death? How many square centimetres of the Planet Earth will our souls have touched”
George Perec (1974) ++
The Forbidden Playground started life as a photographic project. When I began to document a former Battle of Britain Fighter Command Air Force base, back in 2014. It formed the backbone of the final submission for my Masters in Photography. The Forbidden Playground was a personal attempt to understand my visceral connection with a space which had formed such an evocative backdrop to my feral childhood. However, what was initially designed as a critical visual investigation into an edge-land environment on the border of suburbia and the outer London greenbelt, morphed into something more.
This ‘terrain vague’ replete with military bunkers, spitfire blast pens and gun emplacements - a brutal built environment designed for war - became a metaphor for something deeper, richer. Here, planted into a natural landscape of grass expanses, greater knapweed, wild carrot and cow parsley, structures which I had infiltrated as a child decades earlier, invited something more than just a photographic study. What began as an examination of physical structures, evolved into an excavation of family history, childhood play, nostalgia, and personal identity. It became about contemplation and entanglement and paradox and the question: who am I really?
Photography is unique in this - it transcends time and space in a way that few other creative practices can. This way of being out in the world with eyes wide and an open mind is cathartic. On a good day it is seeing, not merely looking, and the vibrations of life are recorded. On a very good day what is found is truly magical - where physical, emotional, mental and spiritual space coheres, creativity explodes into life, and real art gets made.
For me photography is the tangible manifestation of a restless, obsessive curiosity. Photography is about personal disclosure, the chosen revelation bounded tightly by a frame. Making images is definitively reductive – the contemplation on what to leave out being just as important as deciding what to include. And then, the decisive moment, action, a slice of time frozen for all time, a shard of history created. Of course, no two photographers will ever make the same image, however much they share a subject. This is the joy of the medium. It beautifully reflects that each of us attend to the world in an utterly unique way. In a considered photograph, or series of photographs, the maker weaves a narrative that reveals something deeply personal of themselves.
So, the Forbidden Playground. Oxeye daisy, bush vetch, yellow rattle and nettle, enveloping and penetrating concrete, brickwork and steel, inviting exploration. And as the work continued a theme materialised. Multitudes, uncertainty, paradox, contradiction and combination. Duration and transition, permanence and impermanence, new growth and decay, optimism and pessimism, playfulness and melancholy. Time and again new contrasts and juxtapositions appeared – space and place, natural environment and built environment, longevity and ephemerality, discovery and loss. The stark beauty of both the monumental and the humble. The incongruity of the inviting lacunae, cracks and fissures and the repellant massive slabs and walls.
The project led me into an entirely new world of creativity unleashed - a welcome output for the insatiable curiosity that needed to ground, to take root in something meaningful. All the adjacent disciplines of history, archaeology, anthropology, architecture, geography, art, psychology, ecology, and philosophy, all threw something my way. An invitation to gluttony, an offer I couldn’t refuse. And with that a decision made – a decision to turn over the stones of discovery and embrace this web of diverse interconnections.
Through making photographs with intention, we invite reflection on our innermost vulnerability. It was in this multi-dimensional space that I found strong ties back to a complex personal history. The son of an Italian immigrant and grandson of an RAF officer, I grew up in an era when the aftershocks of World War II were still resonant. My parents, born and brought up on either side of a brutal and unforgiving world war, coming together and bridging the divide. But confusion is the nature of childhood and all those misunderstood contrasts were stark. Then, through curiosity, and a grounded creative practice, shards of light started to appear through the cracks that are present in everything. Things come into sharper focus. The Forbidden Playground - a place of childhood freedom and teenage abandon - of unbounded enthusiasm and a surrender of inhibitions, was also a place about loss, betrayal, aloneness, and fear. It was here that I was awakened to the ever-present tension between continuity and change.
This awakening changed everything for me. It now informs all that I do in my work. Continuity and change are not opposites - they are mutually reinforcing realities.
I make space. I do this in a multitude of ways, physically as a developer, and metaphorically as an adviser, a coach and a creator. I have spent thirty-five years relentlessly pursuing excellence in building physical space and now more and more of what I’m asked to do is about building space for possibility.
I’ve seen that the provocation to discover creative fulfillment is the most significant work of all. Space, after all, is just a container, the real juice is in what’s happening for those inside.
The way to creative fulfillment is in finding this middle space where relentless drive can reside more comfortably with uncertainty and doubt and exploration. I’ve noticed more and more that wherever there is a predilection to high achievement there is the need for moderation, for an offset with curiosity and creative discovery. There is always a deeper meaning to be attained than the one found on the frontline in business. I know, I’ve been there and it’s exhausting and it’s lonely. I can’t be this because I’m this we tell ourselves. The Forbidden Playground released me from that dualistic absurdity. Here was a space in which I could become so much more.
We all have a Forbidden Playground, a space for multitude and the resolution of what appear to be contradictions. In this place you become neither one thing nor the other, but both, or better still the manifestation of all your entangled parts. It’s the place where you bring radical honesty and forgiveness, and where intuition trumps logic. It’s where multiple routes to truth emerge and where reason becomes only of them. The data driven world of everyday is left behind and the abundance of holding uncertainty lightly, reveals to us what it is to be human. It’s the place where the gears of your heart change as art is made.
Find the space, enjoy the play.
++ Perec, G. 1974. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. London: Penguin.
"confusion is the nature of childhood" what a line
Thank you Caroline. 🙏🏼 I’m working on a book to home them