Over the past few months I have been involved with a programme of events at Arnolfini called 'Rethinking Archives'. These have explored issues and questions relating particularly to the archiving of contemporary art and live art. The events have included presentations by artists and academics and at the last session an inspiring presentation was given by artist Daniel Belasco Rogers. For the past 5 years Daniel has been using GPS systems to track and archive his daily activities. The resulting work is called The Drawing of My Life (see Daniel's website to find out more).
Two days earlier I had decided to focus my daily practice on map making - an interesting bit of syncronicity - and spent the rest of that week playing with ways of making maps related to my own practice and my daily life. Here are some of the results...

I spent some time last week at Southmead Hospital's Cytopathology Department photographing the journey of the smear sample so I could get as rounded picture as possible of the paths and people involved in diagnosis and treatment of cervical cancer. It was a fascinating couple of hours and I now have lots of new questions to ask and further ideas for photographs I would like to take. One thing that fascinated me was that slides are kept for 10 years before being destroyed. There are tens of thousands of them and they are so heavy they can only be housed on the ground floor otherwise they would come through the ceiling because of the sheer weight of them.
The screeners spend 4 - 5 hours each day looking at samples. They might screen 9 samples in an hour, depending on the complexity of the sample. I expected to find them working in a lab-type setting, but it was like walking in to an open plan office with individual booths, each with their own personal collections of photographs and momentoes - a very human experience.