I collaborated with a number of fabricators to create a series of temporary architectural landscapes using their jigs – wooden custom made shapes that are used as tools to assist in the repeated cutting, placing and securing of their materials – in sculptural installations that I photographed. The fabricators included scenic construction workers who support the film and TV industry that has come to dominate the East Belfast docklands area in place of more traditional manufacturing industries. Their highly skilled labour involves staging partial cityscapes; slices of town scenes, portions of buildings etc. Much of their work is to create the unseen structures that underpin the authenticity of the sets. 

These images are intended as a series of temporary monuments to the inventive nature and evocative gestures of this usually invisible labour, and to a changing city.

Commissioned by Household and supported by Belfast City Council + the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.