He Bedded My Sister At Our Wedding Do Collage

From the Poverty Safari series. I have always struggled with social class. It’s something that has a profound effect on how we all experience life in the UK and it’s something that I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about. This obsession with class (amplified by studying Sociology and Sociolinguistics; by reading the bloody Guardian daily - oh Christ I’m such a cliche) has obviously filtered into my work all along. But at the start of this series I felt like I wanted to make an overt political statement. I was thinking about the clash of culture that lives just one row apart on the magazine racks in the supermarket. On one side Take A Break, Chat, Love It, etc - then on the other Tatler, GQ, Vogue. Almost side by side yet worlds apart in the lifestyles that they represent. Hence the use of images from the latter, with titles taken from headlines in the former. In his book that I’ve appropriated for the role of this series of works, Darren McGarvey outlines how he developed his thinking about the ills of social not solely being the fault of external systems over which you have no control, and how personal responsibility is a crucial and overlooked factor by many in political debate. We need to assess how complicit we are in our own oppression. Not just poor white people but myself and other more privileged peeps who make ourselves mental and financial slaves through our desires for “the right body”, luxury goods, etc. We need to recognise those deliberate actions and behaviours that we take that ultimately make our lives harder and less enjoyable (even if in the moment, they make life feel more enjoyable and easier - yes drinking, I’m talking about you)