Buried In The Suburbs

I had the initial idea of making these little box works probably more than a year ago but making art in the face of a full blown attempt to exterminate a people can stop you in your tracks. The idea that I could make anything meaningful at all, much less in the tin box format of the Attempts to Stop Death series seemed ridiculous, and crass. Even the series title seems inept and over-reaching. The alternative though is to say nothing and I feel that saying nothing is fundamentally the wrong thing to do. On the marches that have been such a feature of the campaign of opposition to the slaughter there is a chant – ‘When Gaza is under attack, what do we do? Stand Up! Fight Back!’ and that is really the only option. As an artist I make art. It’s not always great art but it’s here, it exists in the world and it is an attempt to stand up, to fight back.

The title ‘Buried In The Suburbs‘ derives from a song by Pony Club, a London-based band whose members came from Dublin. The song is about the banality, the mundanity of much of what we do on a day to day basis – We’ve got a hatchback silver Focus, like every other family around us – and it came to me when I was thinking of how there is nothing particularly distinctive about the people being bombed in Gaza. They live in their nondescript houses, drive unremarkable cars, carry out the same repetitive tasks and hold down the same boring jobs as people everywhere. The only thing that marks them out as distinctive is the hatred that is foisted upon them, a hatred that they never asked for and which they do not want.