UNHERALDED STORIES SERIES - TOM HUNTER

UNHERALDED STORIES SERIES 

"The stage on which we move begins already before but is as near as your own front door. And what lies beyond can be made and reshaped as never before. This is the subject of Tom Hunter’s art."

The photos in Tom Hunter’s latest project, Unheralded Stories, have all been inspired by tales he has heard from Hackney residents – and all of them were shot in the borough.

 Anchor and Hope

                              
                                           Death of coloti

  

Death of the party

                          Fall of the night

 Hackney Cut
 
"I wanted to create the sense of an everyday epic, which in this case began with a story of boating adventures overheard in a local pub.
The title refers to a place where the river Lea cuts into Hackney, and this is a journey from the banks of the Hackney Marsh along the river Styx of Greek mythology.
The image shows another friend of mine pulling a boat through a sea of green algae while a woman reclines in her ferry on her epic adventure.
The ferryman, Charon in the original myth, has become Captain Willard, the Martin Sheen character in the film Apocalypse Now, pulling The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault (1888), from the great marsh to the centre of the underworld."

 

Hide and Seek

"With the pictures, some ethereal, some exotic, the 45-year-old wanted to show that you don’t need to travel the world to find amazing landscapes and stories, because they are all around you.
“It’s almost like I want to show the whole world is in Hackney,” said the 45-year old." 

"This photograph of my friend's daughter, Roisin, was taken on the edge of Hackney Marshes on the banks of the river Lea. Roisin is underneath a bridge and is looking up as if in hiding from a seeker.
She is also holding on to a giant, triffid-like plant that could inhabit a South American jungle. The plant is hogweed or angelica archangelia in Latin; it is phototoxic which, in terms of my work, is apt.
The image was inspired by the painting Roger Delivering Angelica by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1819), which depicts a young woman chained to rocks and being rescued from a dragon by a knight in shining armour astride a Hippogriff.
Although I owe the composition and sense of wonder to Ingres, I feel this contemporary female doesn't need a knight to defend her or dragon to threaten her. Her battles are her own, within her changing adolescent body, and her demons and saviours are from her own imagination."

The Mole Man


"Given that Tom is influenced by myths and legends, it is fitting that the collection portrays one of Hackney’s greatest legends, the Mole Man, in the underworld for which he is famous.
Tom bumped into William Lyttle just around the corner from his house in Mortimer Road, after a meal in a Vietnamese restaurant.
The oddball gained worldwide fame as the Mole Man after he spent 40 years digging a 60-foot network of tunnels beneath his £1 million home."

lea valley lines

“I think he started the conversation, asking us where we had been that night, and he went into a rant about the council and about how they were trying to get him. He wanted someone to confess his grievance to,” said Tom, who, having read all about the Mole Man in the Hackney Gazette, realised who was talking to him."

"Mr Lyttle invited him back to his house and Tom got a glimpse of the Aladdin’s cave of junk inside – just weeks before the Mole Man was evicted by the council in 2008.
“It looked like a bomb site and he showed me his little tunnels. It reminded me of a bit of a scrapyard and the mentality of some folk where I grew up in Dorset,” said Tom."
“He’s a hoarder, which you can afford to do in the countryside when you have land – but he’s taken that mentality to the city, and he’s expanded his empire into the subterranean world.”
Although he didn’t want himself to be photographed, Mr Lyttle allowed Tom to go back a couple of weeks later to mock up a photo that he describes as a “subterranean underworld of Hades, showing the Mole Man laid out in a hell of his own making”.
“Sadly, the Mole Man passed away this year, so the work becomes an epitaph to a great life,” said Tom."

Victoria Falls


"It was 5am and his friend Claire was standing below the bitterly cold Regent’s Canal sluice in Victoria Park as the sun rose.

“I always said when I was younger I would go to Victoria Falls in Africa, but I’ve bought Africa to Hackney,” said Tom, who is best known for his photo sculpture The Ghetto, now on permanent display at the Museum of London."

  


Woodberry
 
“It’s about getting people to look at the ordinary life around them, and to look at it in more magical terms,” he said.
“What painters like Caravaggio have created is seen as something magical now, but our life in Hackney is magical too.
“What I do is take the people around me and put them on a larger stage, with gods and angels and dragons and monsters.”