Commission for the Holloway School, part of the Creative Connections Project, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 2003-2004

In the dark, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, edges lose their edginess (or find it), stairwells loom as blackened hollows, a pitch blur. In a city school like Holloway it was hard to find real darkness, the lights of London allowed for sure footedness. The quiet was lovely though, a settled stillness within the building.

In school I used a temporal light source conventionally used for night fishing. These lights glow for eight hours and there are 400 in the installation. Working intuitively, I placed the lights in the schools interior and then took many shots playing with exposure length and aperture. The glowing shape looks as if it could be on the move, an organic, amorphous form roaming around the building in the dark. A secret thing.