Car Yards #1-42

This body of work was undertaken during my doctoral research on art and car cultures. It focuses on the cars point of purchase, the sales yard, as a site of desire and promise, by drawing attention to tropes of liberation and excitement associated with automobile owneship. The series takes as its specific subject car yard bunting which is intended to catch the eye of the motorist through light, colour and movement. This visual device is used in car-related sites and activities throughout the industrialised world, but in its material expression is specific to each individual car yard. In this way the series explores the visual languages of automobile culture designed for mass-production and mass-consumption, but targeting the modern individual. Capturing different conditions of light, wind and weather the images also subtly reference temporality and the changing state of climate, resulting from mass-automobility. The series is also part of a broader creative practice of showing the traces of automobility, rather than image the car itself. Not only does this work to imply the traces or impacts underpinning automobility, but also seeks to emphasise the ability of car culture to go unregistered in the mind or appear unseen through its sheer everyday ubiquity.