Outskirts Day

For Outskirts Day and Outskirts Night we used exactly the same wooden plates but inked them up with very different colours for day and night images. My press was limited in size at the time, so I decided to make the image with two plates to increase the scale to over 5’ across. We had to pin all the prints on the wall to dry between layers! Initially this was started by my Mum singing me Pete Seeger’s song Little Boxes  in response to me telling her about the encroaching urban sprawl  spilling out of Hastings towards our rural idyl  in East Sussex. In Outskirts Day and  Night I was interested in how the simplest  infrastructure of development was laid down on the landscape- like a carpet, with houses following in quick succession. So here you have a suburban house at the end of the line, after pavements and curb stones, street lights and electricity and telephone cables have been rolled out alongside the road.

I was also using a Lynchian and Hitchockian device, similar to a Edward Hopper painting or a more recent Gregory Crewsdon photograph, of the blank window all lit up from within to denote the goings on of a family shuttered up inside their shelter. - TH