46 pinhole photographs on Kodak Portra 160 VC 5 x 4 in sheet film, contact printed on Kodak Ultra Endura semi-matte, image 10.2 x 12.7 cm (5 x 4 in), paper 20,3 x 25,4 cm (10 x 12 in), edition of 3 + 1 AP.

There is a certain embarrassment when artists speak about books, more so than when they speak about f***, despite the two having much in common. This is particularly true in the case of Blake, due to his often-questionable association with either mad genius or New Age mysticism. But have a look at the frontispiece of William Blake’s hand-coloured Jerusalem at the Yale Centre for British Art …

Jerusalem is, above all, a journey reflecting that poem and its city. Over forty-six nights, from Ash Wednesday to Easter morning in 2007, I walked the 750-kilometre labyrinth that I had mapped between Loris Road and the London Stone. Known since the Middle Ages as the "Road to Jerusalem," the classic labyrinth enabled me to project Blake’s poem onto present-day London, meandering “between Blackheath & Hounslow, between Norwood & Finchley,” from my flat in Shepherd’s Bush to the London Stone—an unremarkable yet enigmatic monument, encased outside a (then) vacant office building at 111 Cannon Street.

For Blake, the stone linked two cities: the Regency London he inhabited and the “Spiritual Fourfold London” he envisioned. As he wandered “through each chartered street,” summoning visions of fantastic proportions, so I embarked on my modest pilgrimage. Following only the path I had traced in my A to Z, I carryed a pinhole camera fastened to my chest. Each night walk was recorded in a single exposure. Each morning’s endpoint was my starting point the following night.

This work was conceived to mark Blake’s 250th birthday (he was born on 28 November 1757) and was presented as a multimedia installation for my Master’s degree show. A decade later, having just moved to Italy, I had the opportunity to revisit the work and reconsider what my own experience of “Jerusalem” from Blair to Brexit had been. The installation became this photographic series, while the labyrinth had vanished.