Liminal Code: Systems as Artistic Research
I spent 45 years inside Britain’s institutional machinery—not observing from outside, but living inside the systems that claim to capture, measure, and control human identity. I processed benefit claims in Jobcentres, sold digital infrastructure to the NHS, cleaned automotive factories at night, managed housing allocation systems, coordinated COVID emergency response.
This wasn’t career development. It was fieldwork.
My work doesn’t represent institutional systems. It is institutional systems—transplanted into gallery space, made visible, made confrontable. Each installation proves that humans are irreducible ‘transcription errors’ in bureaucratic DNA: we mutate, contradict our records, exist in states institutions cannot capture.
At 67, after 40 years photographing people, I’ve learned what cameras cannot see: consciousness, being, the unmeasurable depth beneath every surface. Now I want to create space where people observe themselves being observed—and recognize what no system can ever capture.