The imagery of Suspicions balances on the threshold of placelessness and provincialism and traces a path through a sea-port town that blurs the distinctions between fact and fiction, past and present, place and non-place and provides a hazy illumination, akin to the adopted aesthetic of the artist’s photographs, of life in a sleepy sea-side town.
“Developed upon a sandbank that ostensibly emerged from the ocean, a town became prosperous from its herring trade and its harbour, and consequently greatly inhabited. Daniel Defoe, in a Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, described Great Yarmouth as a ‘beautiful town’, though he did not hesitate to recognize its ‘greatest defect’, that ‘there is not room to enlarge the town by building’…
…King Henry III approved a wall and a moat around the town to provide protection for it and the surrounding areas. In a metaphysical sense the wall would augment the town’s affluence, and indeed would convey the significance of its existence. Within the walls the rows were built - essentially narrow passageways of close together housing with doors that opened outwards onto the street, causing many catastrophic incidents that eventually elucidated its reinvention of design. The wall’s insertion perhaps was an inadvertent manifestation of its greatest defect, an ailment augmenting a perpetual notion of locality. Though the majority of the wall and many of the rows were destroyed in World War bombings, the town’s incarcerating natural contour brings an overwhelming confinement to inhabitation. The inadvertent affect of the wall prevails.”
