This photographic and video work grew from wanting to articulate the mechanics of the racism I heard on the evening I arrived in Scotland, when there was the Glasgow airport bombing. The images initially came out of working with coal stained bodies for the Ruin project but I felt like they caught some of the racist imagination that was being cultivated in the media at the time, specifically fear of the black male body (see racist media representation around the Glasgow airport bombing if you need to but I don’t recommend clicking).

Sadly the footage of the video work I made has since been lost (old school tech fail) - there’s a blurry still below - but to describe it:

The ‘miner’ in the performance clutches his throat, trying to breathe and in the same action, stains himself, reminiscent of the way miners necks became stained above their shirt lines. During this his elbow came out of shot a number of times, leaving an image that looked like a white man being strangled by a black hand . As he becomes more panicked the shot pans out and the viewer can see that it is, indeed, his own hand.

This video work, and the photographic studies below, create an illustration of racism being contained in white bodies and show how, as Wood (2002) states, fear of the ‘raced other’ is located in and around white bodies, and is a component of the white archive, unconnected to real black bodies. Photographing from behind the body and detailing goose bumps on the neck drew on ideas of fear and pleasure; attempting to simultaneously illustrate and drain racist imaginings by focusing on where those imaginings are actually located.