Inside Stories

Over a two year period, and with the support of an Arts Council Lottery Grant, I worked with men and women at three prisons in the UK: HMP Liverpool, HMP Styal and Feltham YOI. We used collage, photo and video to explore the meanings that themes such as Justice, Judgement, Responsibility, Power and Freedom have for individual prisoners.

During a series of workshops, project participants made collages and then directed me to go out to gather relevant video footage of the outside world. Some participants also took their own photos within the prison setting. With permission, I recorded conversations with individuals during workshops. Each of the short videos in this series of eleven is a personal portrait, created around a different person's narrative, voiced by an actor. The videos bring together the participants' own photos with video footage which they have co-directed and in one case with texts written by the participant during Covid, when the prison was in lockdown. As far as possible, editorial decisions were made in conversation with each participant.

The work is designed to be shown on a loop across two large adjacent monitors or projections. It can be shown in full, or a more limited selection can be made from the existing 11 video portraits.

Video diptych, 11 short sequences in a loop, full running time: 39min.