Pat Purdy and the glue sniffers camp

Stephen Willats pioneered the concept of making portraits of people and communities by assembling objects of significance to them and collecting their own thoughts about their context. This way of thinking about materials and memory is a key to much late 20th century art.

In 1980 Stephen Willats returned from Berlin where he had been working for two years to revisit the Avondale Housing Estate at Hayes in West London. Here he met one of the occupants, Pat Purdy. Together they initiated a new strategy for Stephen's practice. His work with these sites had always entailed tracing social systems and documenting people's attempts to escape the determinism of a planned environment.

For six years prior to this Stephen had been photographing the working or living environment of ordinary people often focusing on objects that they collected or placed on their desk. These personal effects were presented as the effort of an individual to differentiate their personal spaces and tell their own stories. Stephen's previously application of this research took the form of graphic structures incorporating photographs and texts often quoted directly by his 'collaborators'. Pat Purdy pointed out that instead of photographing objects he could apply them directly and that the text could be written directly and unedited onto the design.

The resulting work, 'Pat Purdy and the glue sniffers camp', is an exemplary case of the index in contemporary art. The context was a residential tower block originally built to rehouse families displaced by slum clearance at the other end of London. The site chosen for the tower was an isolated area in the middle of a wasteland typical of urban fringes. Between the wasteland and the housing project there was a cyclone wire fence. The work takes the form of a photographic triptych with an image from the estate on one side, the wasteland which Pat called the 'Lurky Place' on the other. In the middle is a smaller panel with a close up of a hole in the fence. Attached to the middle panel are objects that had some special significance for the community and their use of the space.

Pat described how the kids on the estate would crawl through the fence and create camps in the 'Lurky Place'. In these camps they escaped the deterministic environment of the project by inhaling the fumes from heated glue cans. A can of 'Evo-stick' applied to the image of the hole in the fence could be seen to have reversed its meaning. In the determined world of the towers it would be a pragmatic object associated with binding and restoring objects while once it passed through the fence into the 'Lurky Place' it became the centre of a dysfunctional ritual of fragmentation.