Cathedral of Labour
In Cathedral of Labour, the factory—once a symbol of progress—now feels like a place of worship to something long dead, where the faith of productivity has replaced the faith of feeling. The hum of machinery becomes a hymn, the rhythm of work a form of prayer. These men—dressed in soft pastels, poised within the geometry of concrete and steel—perform their rituals of purpose, but the meaning has drained away.
Like much of my work, it’s autobiographical. There is a strong element of self-performance and representation. These spaces, though imagined, hold parts of me: my own cycles of making, repeating, perfecting—of finding beauty in burden. The echoes of capitalism run through it: its rise, its collapse, its quiet refusal to die. My photography projects Avenues of America and Passing Through trace this same condition, observing those for whom the system no longer works, or perhaps never did, and the slow erosion of its supposed power.
The traditional male archetype—the worker, the provider, the labourer—sits at the heart of this work. These men, while strong, are stripped of purpose. Their gestures are repetitive, devotional, almost liturgical. They are caught in a cycle that once defined them, but now confines them. They work not for meaning, but from memory.
This project is also my first collaboration with artificial intelligence—a strange, imperfect partner. While AI promises precision, its early gestures are clumsy: limbs distorted, faces half-formed, figures fumbling for coherence. Yet within those inaccuracies lies a kind of truth—the awkwardness of becoming, the poetry of imperfection. Together we have built a world that feels both haunted and tender, one that reflects the friction between the mechanical and the human, the efficient and the emotional.
Rather than seeking technical perfection, I’ve leaned into tone—into atmosphere, colour, rhythm, and quiet dissonance. The work rejects the fetish of accuracy, choosing instead to speak in feeling. The narrative lives not in detail, but in mood; not in precision, but in presence.
In the end, Cathedral of Labour is not a story of destruction, but of release. The man in the pastel suit does not seek to end labour, but to awaken it—to set fire to the numbness that has replaced care. It’s about remembering the body within the system, the breath inside the machine, and the fragile humanity that remains when all else has become mechanised.