My exploration of Englishness focuses on many of the institutions of childhood which have their own hallmarks and visual signifiers: the funfair, a weekend by the sea, Morris Dancing and the small and insignificant details of village life. The images are both an affectionate and an ironic take on English life and culture, at once intensely personal and instantly recognisable.

My images are soaked in saturated, liquid colour, going beyond the real to the hyper-real, the over-inflated. This deliberate garishness, the partiality of the extreme close-up, the fascination with the commonplace, even the 'ordinary', reflects the arbitrariness and the wonder of the child's perspective.

In my professional capacity as a studio photographer at a Museum, I am involved with archiving and recording culturally significant artifacts for posterity. I view the 'low culture' of the fairground or the seaside pier with no less reverence, and as no less relevant, to our sense of who we are, and what our history is about. My work translates some of this curatorial aesthetic to toffee apples, sideshow prizes, ketchup bottles, which are themselves iconic, visually and socially. I am setting today's icons in their relevant context, through considered use of cropping, composition, and painstaking observation of the light, exploring the beauty beyond the ordinary and everyday.

This body of work represents the collision of a number of interests for me. I grew up enthralled by Kitchen Sink dramas, and find the themes of inclusion and alienation, the intimacy of family and community holding things together, and falling apart, are a big influence on the way I see the world. Later, I went on to research the Americanisation of English Culture at university, and this has also had an impact on my focus on the commercial, the political and the personal, and how they interact.

The aesthetics of my Englishness project are very much at odds with my upbringing, amongst a family with working class roots, and determinedly middle-class aspirations. In my work, I am reclaiming much of what has been lost. My feelings towards my subjects are full of ambivalence: a degree of dejection and equally of exhilaration. I try to reflect this conflict in my choice of subjects, and the way they are treated.

In many ways the work is formal, yet playful, observational, yet delicately composed: a historical document in its own right. It is a comment on a society looking for its present in its past, where we have retreated culturally into nostalgia, for want of a clear direction for the future. In my work, I aim to make you think, and make you smile, and to question whether we are rewriting Englishness, or wallowing in the decline of our own institutions.

All images Copyright Suzy Prior

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