GOLD (AU) + SILVER (AG) = 0: Zero Hours Creativity

This work is based around the relationship between creativity and capital in an age of austerity. For many, labour and creativity have become contradictory, not complimentary endeavours. The context for this is the phenomenon of the Zero Hours contract.

The work produced here represents several minutes of my contract reclaimed back from my employers. While cleaning up at the end of my shifts, I collected photographic paper left behind by students and facility users. These shadowgrams are their accidents, gathered from the darkrooms and assembled by me.

Returning to the elementary essence of photographic processes, these lensless images begin from the interaction between light and the materiality of the photographic paper. Captured digitally, in a three dimensional space, they invoke a conversation about photography’s positionality within the related mediums of painting and sculpture. As silver is fixed to the paper, I am remunerated in gold. This exchange, it seems, led to some creativity after all.