This is a work inspired by a story I found online:

 

“This story of two New-Yorkers is one of sheer neurosis:

Living together in a small apartment, they went out every day to buy groceries and newspapers. For years, they didn’t seem to have anything else to do other than to read tens of daily newspapers.

When the building superintendent hadn’t seen them for a few days, he alerted the police; they were found dead, killed by poisonous fumes from faulty heating, lying on piles of papers. The state of the apartment was indescribable. Right up to the ceiling, piles of carefully tied-up newspapers filled four rooms...  There were two ever-narrowing and dangerous passageways, one leading to the bathroom, the other to the front door.”

 

The Daily News features the interior space of my old duplex flat in Byker Wall, Newcastle – a building famously designed in the 1970s by Scandinavian architect Ralph Erskine. Shaky-eye-view camera work leads the viewer from room to room, each of which is filled with bundles of newspapers and little other sign of human habitation. The camera work and content make reference to the ground-breaking horror movie The Evil Dead, which pioneered the use of the low to the ground ‘stalker‘ camera shot, and to the TV documentary programme Life of Grime New York which recently featured some council workers cleaning up an apartment in which a several week old corpse had been discovered in bed – the programme showed the state of the mattress, soaked through with various fluids, the smells emitted left to the viewers’ imaginations.  

The Daily News was shot using a miniature web-cam within an exact 1/8 scale model of the Byker Wall apartment, built in my studio.

 

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