Tony McCorry
British Estates
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Throughout his career as an artist, Tony McCorry explored the urban landscape, expressing autobiographical experiences of growing up on city estates, recalling incidents of loss, violence, anger and frustration. The artist developed this theme by seeking out and documenting new environments which triggered these reverberations of memory, whilst refining his technical methods of painting to broaden his discourse. The aim of British Estates was to encourage debate on the wider nature of social housing.
McCorry juxtaposed large scale paintings from two concurrent bodies of work. The main body comprised paintings of British estates at differing stages of decay, produced as part of a research project documenting areas of social housing in densely populated areas of England, Scotland and Wales, supported by West Midland Arts. These were shown alongside work from a project depicting social housing as portrayed in popular British television programmes.