My Head in Bars, 1995

Cromalin print on Aluminium

69 x 67.5 cm

This very early Sue Webster work was made for the 1995 village fete type experimental affair invented by the late art impresario Joshua Compston entitled The Hanging Picnic held on the railings of Hoxton Square that was a nod to the traditional Sunday Painters who hung their wares to the railings along the Bayswater Road in West London.

Nowadays people are well used to creating illusion by computer but this photograph was created by real life circumstance which involved myself and Tim waking at the crack of dawn and tip toeing from our studio on Rivington Street across Old Street and up towards Hoxton Square with an eight foot long scaffold pole we’d borrowed from a building site next to our studio. We chose a prominent area of the railings on the South West corner of Hoxton Square, which by complete happenstance was bang opposite what was soon to become the East End gallery of White Cube... we then positioned the 8 foot scaffold pole between two black iron railings at ground level and with all our adolescent might and artistic determination managed to prise them apart enough to slip my head through and slide my slender neck high into position and lay in wait until photographer Robert Fairer arrived to immortalise my head trapped behind bars forever.

I then nipped to the Metro photographic centre at the other end of Old Street in order to enlarge the negative to actual size, mounted it on an aluminium backing and hung it back in the exact same spot on the railings in time for the outdoor exhibition... In full colour and from a certain distance it looked as if I was hanging.