Hackney, Fragments & Sculptures is a photographic series that documents the small points of impact where intangible economic ideas are shaped into material reality . To the passerby these observations might at first appear banal; some urban detritus, a house being renovated or a broken park fence. Yet the act of photography uncovers repetitions of vital themes where images become signifiers of an almost imperceivable social force moving throughout the borough. Part of it is a story we’re all too familiar with in our urban spaces, often broadly labeled as 'gentrification', evoking images of oat milk lattes and tweed wearing hipsters. Yet this felt like a disorientating misnomer for the world I saw around me. There is an elusive nature to capturing something as a slow and intangible as a social force, something that can often take decades to materialise. It became somewhat of a riddle to me - It's not too dissimilar to foolishly attempting to photograph a rising tide only to walk away with an image of the sea. Taking a more semiotic approach to the meidum helped solve this riddle. The camera itself can not capture a concept as a whole, but rather document the signifers left throughout the borough where people and place meet and leave their mark. It's within the ubiquitous and often subconscious understanding of gentrification within the viewers mind that the concept (the signified) meets the signifier (the photograph) and the signs of this social force is created. The sign is only made whole through the act of photography and study of the minutiae created by the ebb and flow of a social tide shaped by rising house prices, rents, community funding cuts and changing markets. This body of work is not exclusively about gentrification, but about an attempt to not resolve, but rather display the contradictions at play between people and place, to document what exists at a moment in time and provoke thought about what is yet to become and what is yet to be lost. The full portfolio of over 50 images was captured over the course of a year and a half which I'm in the process of organising into a book.