Making a series of imaginary incursions across London (that correspond to six Dickensian walks that have been devised for Our Mutual Friends), Graham Hudson’s Works in Progress echoes Dickens’ own method of recording overlooked everyday details in his peripatetic observations of London life. Rather than the disparate people who make up the capital, Hudson’s focus is on the marks they make – in particular the intrusions and disruptions of road works. In an escalating almanac of images, accessible from his Facebook page, Hudson meticulously documents these irregular outbreaks on the surface of the urban environment – each temporary roadblock providing a pause for thought, and an opportunity to photograph what surrounds it. Fascinated by the way these public works leave rubble behind them in random sculptural arrangements, Hudson celebrates each makeshift ‘installation’, piling image upon image, and, in a special satellite of the project in Dickens’ birthplace of Portsmouth, gathering together actual physical debris from local sites. As if alluding to the extent to which even the most short-lived interruption can seem to drag on forever, Hudson implies that the ultimate ‘work in progress' may well be the modern city itself.

This project was commissioned as part of the group project Our Mutual Friends