Things fall apart by Matt Courtney

Sullen paths and unremarkable lanes.Muted waypoints and emptyenclosures.The recursive back and forth.Unresolved and fractured out oftime.

Me walking with my girls.

These photographs depict the shared walks with my two young daughters within the quiet village here in North East Wales during the early days of the first lockdown. Little of the places and scenes encountered during these walks could be described as picturesque or eye-catching in a conventional sense, but from these fractured sights and recurring waypoints came the chance for us to pause and find some sort of calm, away from the disorientating uncertainty of the unfolding situation. These walks would become the new routine by which we’d underpin our days spent together, simply trying to make some semblance of sense of the situation and the place we happened to find ourselves in.

With the gradual lifting of our boundaries and the return to the lockstep groove of our old routines and busy lives, the later photographs took on an increasingly broader scope, but in order to emphasise this fractured moment in time, I wanted to dispel any sense of chronological order through the sequencing.

Though the girls are absent from the photographs, their presence in the work indelibly informs and provides the gentle undertow that pushed and pulled us through the repeated sights and scenes encountered. The cover design features artwork that was made by my youngest daughter during this time.