Video extract: Tom explains his working process
Top: Tom Hunter, 'Living in Hell', 2004.
Courtesy the artist and Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.
Bottom: Le Nain Brothers, 'Four Figures at a Table', about 1643.
Photo © The National Gallery, London.
This is one of a series of photographs inspired by headlines appearing in Hunter's local newspaper, the Hackney Gazette.
The story beneath the headline 'Living in Hell' told of a 74-year old woman who had been left to live in damp, vermin-infested accommodation condemned as unfit for human habitation.
Hunter's initial reference is a painting by one of the Le Nain brothers, 'Four Figures at a Table'. It shows a woman and her family in a humble peasant interior. She has a care-worn expression that suggests her life is hard, but that is also tempered with a quiet sense of self-respect.
In Hunter's version of this composition, the family have gone. The woman is abandoned. She sits wrapped up against the cold; the electric heater glows dimly. The sofa is filthy and worn and there is decaying food uneaten in its cardboard wrapping. Cockroaches crawl over every surface and a naked electric light bulb starkly reveals the woman's shocking fate.
Torn from its original 17th-century context, the dignified poverty of the Le Nain painting becomes brutally degrading in today's circumstances.
