The photograph, taken in November 1965, is of two of my boyhood friends, Robert Walthew holding a euphonium and Keith Atkey holding a violin. The composition is as formal as the clothes they were expected to wear at school yet contains incongruities such as Keith wearing neither shirt nor tie with his semi-stiff collar. The photograph was something that just happened.
Once printed, the photo was pinned up on a bedroom wall, and by chance, next to a programme of a play performed by members of the French department at Nottingham University earlier that year. As I was struggling with my French 'A' level studies, I never really got to grips with what the play was about but the title fascinated me. The idea of declaring something that is deemed to have happened as not going to happen seemed wonderfully obtuse . . . and fascinating! Somehow the photographic image and the implausibility of the play's title just went together; not least of which there was the romance of playing with a partly understood foreign language. I think this was the first time I became interested in the curious nature of languages.
By 1975, this random juxtaposition of photograph and printed legend seemed so significant that I decided to formalise the idea into a single image. The image was then deconstructed and then screen-printed onto three layers of glass held apart within a wooden frame. For optimum display the work required back lighting, however it spent the next twenty seven years wrapped up and hidden away.
It next saw the light of day during a brief exhibition in France in the autumn of 2002. Twenty seven years later, the interaction of this enclosed image and light no longer seemed satisfactory. What passed in 1975 could now be bettered; an internal light source was the answer and neon tube the medium.
