Still Fighting

Nobody told them the game was over.

That is the first thing I thought when I found them. Red and blue, locked mid-punch, plastic fists pressed against plastic chests in a clinch that has lasted decades. The room around them had completely surrendered — walls stripped back to bare brick, plaster fallen in sheets, a window broken and left open to whatever weather came next. A teacup on the table's edge, waiting for someone who is never coming back. And in the middle of all that collapse, this: a toy boxing ring, still standing, its fighters still at it.

I had one of these as a boy. You pressed the levers under the ring and the arms swung. There was a satisfying click when a punch connected — hollow plastic on hollow plastic — and the winner's head would pop up. My brother always took the red one. I never worked out why red always seemed to win. I stood in that ruined room for a long time, not photographing anything, just remembering the sound of those levers.

What stopped me — what made me set the camera down on the table and simply look — was how upright they were. Everything else in that room had given in to time. The walls had given in. The ceiling had given in. But these two had not moved a fraction. They were exactly where someone left them, mid-fight, as if the room had simply decided to fall apart around them while they carried on regardless.

There is something about abandoned objects that have no business being cheerful. The primary colours here — that red, that blue, the yellow of the ring — are a kind of violence against the decay. They do not belong. And yet they are completely at home. That collision between childhood colour and adult ruin is something I have found myself returning to across the work gathered in Echoes of Childhood — the strange persistence of the things we played with, long after the playing stopped. The image sits in the same emotional territory I've been working through across The Forgotten Room — spaces where the last person left without ceremony, and the objects stayed behind to negotiate their own relationship with time.

I have written elsewhere about the things that draw me back to places like this — the pull of presence in absence, the question of who left and why and what they took and what they couldn't bring themselves to carry. Those questions are explored more fully over at What Draws Me There, if you want to follow that thread further. But here, standing in front of this particular table, in this particular room, the question felt simpler and more personal: did they know, when they walked out, that they were walking out for the last time?

This piece does not ask to be looked at quickly. It reveals itself in stages — the cobwebs first, then the teacup, then the paper on the table's surface, then the quality of light through that broken window landing on red plastic as if it had been placed there deliberately. It changes as the light in the room changes. It rewards the kind of looking that most rooms no longer ask for. The Forgotten Kitchen does the same — objects waiting in silence for an attention no one ever paid them again.

Still Fighting is printed on premium cotton rag, a surface that holds shadow the way old rooms hold silence — without fuss, without announcement. The texture gives the image a weight that glass cannot. It is a print you live with, not one you glance at. It settles into a space as if it has always been there. As if it, too, has been waiting.