Waiting for the drivers to change over.
When someone takes a moment to document life’s mundane moments, the results are fascinating. London artist Liberty Rowley shoots her city through an honest lens.
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Travelling an hour each way to and from work every day by bus sometimes feels like a lot of wasted time. I wanted a way to make a game of it, turn it in to a creative challenge, so I decided to take a photograph every time the bus I was on stopped for the Driver to swap with a colleague.
15 years after graduating art school — unlike so many artists in London — I finally have an art practice where it doesn’t matter if I can’t afford a studio, or I don’t have much time outside of my full-time job.
My daily commute is my studio.
I like that while the images document a very specific time and place — the two minutes the bus is stopped at Stop D, outside the Food & Wine shop — they also appear strangely timeless and un-placeable. It’s perhaps one of the intriguing things about London, that it can look like anywhere in the world, at any time over the last 50 years.
The transformation the weather makes to the images is one of my favourite things about this project: the same stop on a sunny day, and a day where you can barely see out of the window because of the rain on the outside of the glass, or the condensation on the inside.
During the couple of years I’ve been doing this, the automated announcement changed from “The bus will wait a short time for a change of drivers to take place” to “The bus will wait here whilst the drivers change over.”
I enjoy the new, more concise version.
Other work by Liberty.
Liberty Rowley’s The London Arts Board is a gallery that exists on a disused municipal notice board on a piece of waste ground Peckham Road, dedicated to giving emerging artists the chance to have a solo exhibition in London.
Liberty is also co-curator of Video Strolls, a group that organises screenings of artists films and journeying and place.