‘The Past is a foreign country, they do things differently there’ – So begins ‘The Go-Between’ by LP Hartley, the story of a man in his mid-sixties piecing together his past from the pages of a diary written many years before. In this book words, symbols and objects form strong nostalgic links to the history of the protagonist, whilst exuding the scent of private past lives. Alistair Woods has something of a Steptoe and Son approach to the production of artworks. For Woods the hedgerows, back alleys and gutters are a veritable treasure trove of nostalgia, a world in which objects relinquish their histories and meaning in favour of a new lease of life.

On a warm and sunny afternoon in May the smell of creosote, turps and paint mingle on the air as I sit in the kitchen to draft this text. Alistair Woods has spent every day, for the past two weeks of his three week tenure at BasementArtsProject, in the gallery /studio /basement space assembling a work that is fast becoming monumental in its nature. Alongside the smells, the drilling and the banging, the sounds of cockney cheeky chappies Chas & Dave drift upwards from our subterranean art space beneath the house. The soundtrack alternates between cockney pub sing-alongs and mix-tapes of old school Hip-Hop. I mention this because there seems to be a correlation between what I experience of this work at a slight remove – in a different room through sounds and smell, and what I experience of it when in the room looking at it. This I think is the reaction of many when confronted by Alistair’s work.

On the opening night of ‘Subjected To Change’ BasementArtsProject presented a two-room assemblage of works made during his degree and over the course of the last year since graduating from Leeds Metropolitan University.

The work of Alistair Woods is in a constant state of flux. Whilst all works are created with the intention of being highly individual finished pieces in their own right, it is the constant reorganisation of these pieces when displayed, that shows just how this work is really meant to operate. A constantly shifting landscape of ideas, reminiscences, memories and physical objects that harken back to a previous life elsewhere, all the while demonstrating the allure of an equally mysterious future.

Woods regularly speaks of false histories and it is only when you start to look deeper into the constituent parts of these assemblages that you realise that things are not quite what they seem. The use of railway paraphernalia is less the rose tinted, old Joanna sing along of Chas & Dave, and more akin to the dark underbelly portrayed in the hip hop soundtracks of this temporary workspace. Herein lies the success of Woods’ work, a visually appealing piece of storytelling through discarded and lost objects that reveal themselves to those who dare to scratch beneath the surface.

Each day Woods returns not only with new material to add to his work, but also roles of film shot whilst travelling from his digs north of the city en route to BasementArtsProject. Some of these photographs are documentary others delve into abstraction but all depict the reality of a journey that is as much spiritual as it is physical.

Bruce Davies | May 2014