When I was a child, my mother told me, on many occasions, how I came to be conceived. Apparently my arrival in this world was neither planned nor welcome. The story goes like this:
In 1963 my parents travelled to London to see Boccaccio '70 at the Curzon Cinema in Mayfair. My father was 59 years old at the time, my mother was 34. After they had watched the movie they stayed at the nearby Grosvenor House Hotel and the ensuing night of passion resulted in me. Despite my mother's efforts to terminate the pregnancy, through drinking gin in the bath and a variety of other methods, I finally arrived on the scene nine months later.
59 years on, I decided to retrace my parents steps of that night, as best I could, visiting the Curzon Cinema and staying at the Grosvenor House Hotel at exactly the age my own father would had been. My aim was to gain some kind of ownership over this narrative, to make my own sense of it in relation to actual places and a particular time of life. I did not see Boccaccio '70 at the Curzon that night but I have spent many hours watching this at home knowing it was the film my parents had travelled to see. Indeed the story goes that it was my father's fondness for one of the film's stars, Sophia Loren, that motivated that trip to London and she is therefore intrinsically linked to my own understanding of myself. In short, without Sophia Loren I would not exist. I seek to celebrate this fact here and to be thankful for the passion and abandon of that night in 1963, rather than viewing it as a mistake. On the whole my parents liked to do things in an orderly and controlled fashion....things needed to be correct and as planned....I am happy to be the result of a moment where this broke down and something more immediate, real and primal took hold.
This is, therefore, an unashamedly personal and self involved piece of work. It has taken me many years to place it on my website. It may, or may not, be of interest to anyone but myself, but I hope the relationship between a very private act, a rather inappropriate family myth and a highly sexualised cultural icon proves to be somehow thought provoking, even if not wholly relatable.
The work combines contemporary images as well as appropriated archive material. The 35mm slide of Sophia Loren was found amongst my father's own slides. It was the only slide out of several hundred that he had bought rather than taken.
The section of Boccaccio '70 that features Sophia Loren is titled The Raffle, it is about chance and an unlikely outcome. This feels somehow prophetic.