All the Things That Make You Happy

What constitutes happiness? Where does it reside — in an object, a memory, a place, an experience, or in the meanings we attach to them?

All the Things That Make You Happy began as a site-responsive photographic project created specifically for an exhibition at The Black Book in Soho, London.

Rather than bringing an existing body of work into the space, I wanted to make something in response to the character of the place itself. With the help of Fabrizio Canino, the bar's manager, I collected wine corks and other small remnants from the venue and began constructing a series of still lifes around them.

These were combined with flowers, books, wine, food and found objects, alongside personal objects from my own family archive, some more than a century old. The resulting photographs bring together different periods, histories and associations: the ephemeral pleasures of a particular place alongside objects that have survived across generations.

At the centre of the project is a deceptively simple question: what are the things that make us happy? The ordinary, the peculiar, the inherited and the imagined can all acquire meaning through memory and association. Happiness may reside as much in the stories we attach to things as in the things themselves.

By bringing old and new objects into the same constructed space, the series explores ideas of memory, belonging and continuity — themes that have subsequently become increasingly central to my wider artistic practice.