Between the spring of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, I found myself stranded in the south west of France. It was an area I was very familiar with, in very unfamiliar circumstances and trying to navigate an emotional landscape very alien to me. It was only a year earlier, in 2018, that my mother died suddenly of lung cancer, only to be followed seven weeks later with my partners mother dying of a stroke. Within the space of seven weeks both of our world’s had crumbled to dust, and within this new landscape of emotional devastation we had somehow had to find some sense of meaning and order to what was enveloping us.

Grief is the oddest thing, for which nobody gives you a manual of what to do or how to behave, how to process the feelings, how to deal with unruly relatives, solicitors, removal men, utility bills. What to do with all the ‘stuff’ collected over a lifetime. Somehow carving out a legacy of a whole person’s life, which at the end of the day gets distilled down to the contents of a shipping container. It’s overwhelming. It’s too much to process. The emotions are too raw to comprehend. It’s like your whole life and your whole world and your whole being are just sucked into a vortex for which there is no rational means of escape. The cliché that time heals all wounds is true, but it does take time. A long time.

My mother lived in Whitehaven and my partners mother lived nearly a thousand miles away in the small village of Villebois Lavalette in the Charente, just south of Angoulême. We’d already spent a long time running around Whitehaven and the Lake District clearing the house, rehousing cats, and plants, and dealing with nefarious siblings and funeral directors. We then had to do the same in France, except this time there was house that needed selling, and anybody that knows rural France will know that these things take time.

During the spring of 2019 and into the summer, and winter of 2019/20 we entered a world of rural France where the pace of everything was much slower. This waiting and the break from the chaos was welcome, and gave us time to reflect, but at times it was like ‘waiting for Godot’. We were still very raw and emotional. Still trying to process everything. Trying to work out what we had lost and that which would never be again. We spent a lot of time driving round the French countryside, ambling down back lanes, backwards and forwards to the déchèterie, to Angoulême, to Super U, to Verteillac, to the mechanic in Cherval in 41 degrees heat, to the river to swim in. All the while avoiding nefarious siblings.

During these amblings, these repetitive excursions we would encounter the same landscapes, the same towns, the same roads, the same churches, the same trees, and rivers. We were still trying to work out the emotional turmoil that we had been plunged into. I wanted to find some sort of reason, some sort of rationality. A way of meditating upon things and finding a sense of order within the chaos.

I had already photographed one of the small art deco bus stops that you find in this region. They are for children to wait for the school buses and the design of them hasn’t changed since the 1930’s. These bus stops sit quietly in the landscape. Not intrusive, almost as if they are waiting for a bus themselves. If you look for them, they are dotted all over the countryside. I started to photograph as many of these bus stops as I could. It gave me a sense of purpose, and a sense of reason. It provided a much-needed sense of order for me that wasn’t the all-encompassing chaos of grief. It provided for me a stillness and a time to reflect and to meditate upon things outside of myself.

Following in the path of Edward Ruscha sixty years earlier, Twenty Six French Bus Stops pays homage to Twentysix Gasoline Stations. The reasoning is very different, but the approach and sensibility are very similar. Highlighting the overlooked within the landscape, this appropriation, although not faithful, is merely a device for me to meditate upon, what was a very difficult period in my life, and hopefully bring some resolution and respite.


T.S. Eliot – The Wasteland