Lonesome Way.

'Lonesome Way' is a 7 minute digital video work which exhibited at Pearl, London as part of Rancho Notorious group show 15th Nov-14th Dec 2003 with work by Albert Freeman, John Isaacs, Cornelia Parker, Pascal Rousson and Richard Woods. The work constructs a Country and Western song whose lyrics are culled from details of a 360 degree pan around a neighbourhood of South London whose streets include 'Lonesome Way'. The musical genre allowed me to consider the popular music video form and to create a work which made references to popular culture as well as offering a view of a part of London from a perspective close to the documentrist. I decided that the form of the work would be dictated by the musical structure and both form and content would attempt to replicate the Japanese haiku – distilled, understated, almost matter-of-fact and yet subtly emotionally powerful. The process of making the work began with the gathering of documentary video material of the area surrounding Lonesome Way in South London. This material was sifted and sound and visuals interwoven to slowly reveal an internal and external landscape. The work relies on the documentary nature of the visual material and the formality of the song, so that the structural elements are foregrounded allowing the content to slowly transform perceptions of location and figure. Re-presented at 'One Night Stand' group show, S. Antonio TEXAS, Feb 2004 and at Gimpel Fils, London 2006. According to Sarah Kent, “As the camera pans 360 degrees around urban streets, things seen …provoke snippets of country-and-western song: when the railings reappear, for instance, Miller sings, 'Just mending fences that somehow got broken'. Crummy surroundings, the solitude of the urban cowboy and the loneliness expressed in the song create a mood of surprising melancholy."