video

photographs

Traces of everyday life. But this is not an everyday place.

RAF Coltishall, Norfolk, is hard to find by road, a junction of the pastoral and the apocalyptic.

It functioned from 1939 onwards, a strategic WW2 and Cold War interceptor station. The airbase has been closed, its assets dispersed. As the base emptied, and buildings are sealed to await new owners and new purposes, small human marks and responses take the hard edge off the fading concrete and steel.

Three artists- Angus Boulton, Gair Dunlop and Louise K Wilson - have been given unprecedented access to the site, and have been working there over the past three years. Gair Dunlop is working with the related themes of militarism and modernity, creating video and photography that contributes to a sense of place.
The military airfield is a modernist environment par excellence; it consists of an interlocking series of utilitarian structures, where highly codified behavioural cues prevail.
This work is not concerned with nostalgia. It is, however, attempting to visualise both sides of modernism. On the one hand, there is the bright clean future of art galleries and glass towers, which shades somewhat gracelessly into the entropic twilight of new towns and cheap housing. On the other hand, there is the functionalist modernism of the bunker, the airfield, and the government laboratory. Theses two sides of modernism are not so far apart; after all, they had the same architects and builders.