Christopher Steadman

'The Only Way Down is Down' takes on the disparate desperations of office boredom, machine horror, sex with strangers, cultural signs and symbols, and manages to bring an elegant and almost symphonic quality to themes that might otherwise incur a sense of drudgery and despair. Steadman teases and taunts us with the hidden dynamic of what goes on behind the closed doors of an elevator when anonymous strangers are forced to share a confined space. Through the tension and repetition of the opening and closing of elevator doors, the artist's interest in isolation is manifested as he follows a virtually invisible character up and down the empty shaft of what becomes a powerful reminder of the banality and anonymity of urban modernisation.