Caught in Between

Colour Photographs by Heather McDonough

“As is well known when the moon hours lengthen, human beings come adrift from the regularity of their mechanical clocks. They nod at noon, dream in waking hours, open their eyes to the pitch black night. And as the borders between night and day stretch to their thinnest, so too do the borders between worlds. Dreams and stories merge with lived experience, the dead and the living brush against each other in their comings and goings, the past and the present touch and overlap.”

Once upon a River by Alice Setterfield

This work is about ‘In between states’ emotionally, physically and actually.

This work was made during walks in March 2020 to July 2021. All of the photographs are made in Hackney, East London on repeated routes walked over and over again in the changing seasons and weathers, both during the day and at night. This work is inspired by the colour field painters and American abstract expressionists.

The work is purposely assembled in groups of four images, to be seen as one image, interspersed with single images. This set of images is part of over 300 images being sequenced into a book and being displayed on the local recycling trucks digital information screens, at night in Hackney in March 2022.