above: Test shot for Plane Street tableau . . .

Actually an instance of serendipity: a double exposure which lends an extra sense of the ethereal to the figure on the stairs. I'm interested in 'populating' the Plane Street church in the first instance with the sort of folk demons commonly associated with urban depridation.

Creating the ideas for images about the way in which ex members of Plane Street church have related to and continue relate to the building they lost control of has been both exciting and at the same time, frustrating.

The potential for images based on peoples' relationship to the building is imense, but it has taken and continues to take, some 'unlocking'.

The people connected with the church were, by and large, extremely reluctant to actively participate in the project. Time and again I've heard from them that discussing - let alone returning to - the church was a painful experience akin to reopening the sort of emotional wounds commonly associated with bereavement.

In discussing the fact that they had not felt able to return to the church People repeatedly talked about the damage which they had heard had been done to the building in their absence. This they said was one of the things which upset them most and prevented their return.

In the face of all this (understandable) reluctance, I really began to doubt whether I could forge images about the church and the relationship of its one time members to it.

Then in one of those 'eureka' moments it occured to me that the answer to my problems actually lay in the accounts I was gathering from the ex church members and their representitives: Despite their stoical assirtions that when all is said and done a building is only an assemblage of bricks and mortar and that of necessity people had 'moved on' in their own lives, it was clear that people still felt an emotional attachment to the Plane Street church and that they had continued to think about the building since their departure.

For many people these thoughts appeared to centre in no small part on speculation about what had happened to the church since it closed its doors in 1995.

Ex church members it appeared, had an active imagination in which the ongoing story of the church and its gradual demise were played out, fuelled by second and third hand accounts of the building's deteriorating condition.

In attempting to explore the church goers' ongoing emotional relationship to their space, I became intrigued by the idea of populating that space with the infernal characters suggested by their accounts of its deterioration.

SSo it was that I came up with the idea of repopulating the church with spectral figures from contemporary urban folk demons.

above: Test shot for Plane Street tableau . . .

The original idea behind the 'Fantasists' was to create a series of quite formal tableaux illustrating peoples' relationships to different spaces, but the ideas around the Plane Street site are quite suited tostylistic devices which emphasise the ethereal nature of the characters in the images.