DISTRESS PURCHASE

2023 - ongoing

Wall based sculptures using aluminium and rubber tyre tread waste product gifted by Bridgestone and Marangoni tyre manufacturers.


If you drive down any motorway in the UK, if not any motorway in world, you will notice, just as I have, the blown-out tyres which inhabit the lay-by. They are relics of the speed of distribution and sometimes violent action which courses through this country’s veins via the motorway.

‘Distress Purchase’, is an economic term for commercial products bought out of absolute necessity – rather than pleasure, or impulse. A tyre, for most consumers, is a distress purchase. It is also an essential mediator within systems of haulage that enable global trade, transporting commodities from factories, distribution centres and ports to consumers. ‘Distress’ also refers to the wear-and-tear on trucks, drivers and the earth at large, under the demands of consumption.

The works zoom into the complex circulations of goods in the UK, using the tyre as an emblem to encapsulate (the state of) society today: socially, politically and emotionally.

The tyre’s rotations draw me to the histories and motifs of the assembly line, the conveyor belt, rubber and oil: a mixture of references which are intertwined and dispersed across my readings of the contemporary zig-zagging of commodity exchanges over roads. 

These works are developed using the waste materials gifted by Bridgestone and Marangoni tyre factories — materials used to ‘re-manufacture’ used tyres before being sent to scrap. They introduce viewers to the mesmerising abstraction of these familiar-yet-unfamiliar everyday objects.




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