No Ruined Stone
Duke revisited the Muirhouse housing scheme in Edinburgh, where he was born and lived until the age of 19. An area of severe social and economic deprivation, the community has struggled with a wide range of social issues. In an attempt to eradicate its troubled past, many of the sub-standard homes built there in the 1950s and 1960s have been razed. Duke’s project, the second in a planned trilogy of projects which explore themes of identity in Scotland, saw him revisit the area to photograph the residents on location and the surrounding dwellings that make up the estate, and to explore how the community is dealing with the changes in its environment.
Barnes writes; “..so many of these photographs seem to be about the task of articulating emptiness……He is the returning eyewitness, mapping invisible traces of decades past onto the surface of his photographs of today. The viewer sees the grain and truth of the present, yet the cumulative effect of these images is of a haunted, otherworldly place. Duke’s challenge has been to balance the demands of an objective documentary approach within a subjective and personal project. He has striven and found a way to depict the neglected, the invisible, and that which lives only in memory. His experience of the social injustice inflicted on his subject brings a not eof controlled and justified anger to these photographs. But the overwhelming tone is one of empathy for these predominantly unloved places and the individuals who carry out their daily lives there.”
© The Artist
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Object data
Date 2016 - 2018 Accession 2018.047.3 Type Photography Print Materials Support paper Dimensions 69.4cm x 57cm x 56cm x 44cm Acquisition Deposit, RSA Morton Award for Lens-Based Media Duke, Paul (February 8th, 2018) -
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