Peter Ainsworth

Concrete Island, 2010 depicts walls that support a flyover of the A406 (a ring road in the suburbs of North London). The project's title refers to a JG Ballard's novel of the same name in which an architect becomes stranded between intersecting motorways after a car crash: a modern interpretation of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. The space depicted in Ainsworth's photographs is surrounded on all sides by roads. It is a space that exists in a footprint of an overpass, an uninhabited isosceles of land with no specific social designation other than as waste. However within the photographs there is little evidence of the world beyond the wall: the view is suffocating, controlled, concentrating the viewers' eye on human intervention within these landscapes.