OOPS

The project OOPS seeks to interrogate risk and safety within the workplace as a site of creativity, absurdity and humour.

Hazards in the workplace are often caused by cutting corners, to achieve the goal more quickly. A search on Instagram will find many health and safety ‘fails’ featuring hapless characters who have allowed themselves to be caught in the act. A worker balances his ladder on a couple of buckets for that extra reach; a computer is propped up on a pile of folders to equal eye-height. These creative acts sometimes result in performative and sculptural results, where objects are combined in unusual ways, or bodies are contorted like a piece of performance art. Health and safety legislation including the ‘Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974’ has been put in place to protect workers in the UK and this has led to reams of training materials aimed at preventing accidents. Photographs of hazards began life in earnest in the pamphlets and newsletters of the British Safety Council, such as the banal but fascinating 'slips, trips and falls' series. This project seeks to interrogate risk and safety within the workplace as a site of creativity, absurdity and humour.