'Living in Hell', 2004
Transcript
The picture 'Living in Hell' was obviously based on a title from the Hackney Gazette, and it caught my imagination because there was an actual picture with this one, which there normally isn't in the Hackney Gazette.
It's just of a woman who looks as though she's in a pretty disgusting place. I've been in lots of council flats and lots of places in Hackney which have been infested with cockroaches and rats and mice, and all the rest of it, and I know how horrible it is.
For some reason, it doesn't quite seem so bad when you're a young person and you're maybe living in a squat or living in cheap accommodation, and you know you're only going to be there a few months or you're not paying much rent, and you can escape the situation.
But for this woman it's a very different situation - this is her home, she lives there, and she's not going anywhere, and Hackney Council's not helping her out. She's not bed-bound, she's actually sofa-bound, and so she's stuck on this settee, she's eating from the settee, and she's almost being eaten alive by all these vermin, or whatever you like to call them, and it is just my idea of hell.
And there's a painting by the Le Nain brothers, French painters, I believe, and there's an older woman sitting at a table in these very dire surroundings - she looks like a peasant - and it's not celebrating her surroundings, it's actually talking, I think, about the poverty and the sparseness of this woman's life. But I think she has got a bit of dignity to her…
But she's there, and she's there with her family, so you really get a feeling that she's supported, and she's part of something in her poverty, and I wanted to recreate this. But by removing the other three members of her family, it really makes living in hell more hellish, if it's possible to make hell more hellish. She's by herself, there's no one to support her.
So it's actually a heightened sense of poverty and isolation and loneliness, and the whole hell of living in a modern-day society, where's there's actually no one to help you out at all.
