The summer of 2010 saw many exciting and fresh arts trails take place as part of Essex County Councils Summer of Art. I had the pleasure of being selected to be a part of the Basildon District Art Trail both as an exhibiting artist, in one of the many venues throughout the district, and as one of three resident artists. The concept I had in mind was to capture a cross-section of our district through the weekend of the arts trail. I began this piece of work at the brochure launch, where I took portraits of participating artists, venue hosts, councillors and the trail organisers. These were combined into a single image that was on display at the Eastgate Centre for the weekend of the arts trail. This image became the backbone to which I added the images that I shot over the arts trail weekend. These images were of members of the public passing through the centre as well as artists and groups invited to be part of the work.

This concept was inspired by a Danish photographer/artist; Simon Hoegsberg, who patiently created "We're all gonna die: 100 metres of existence" by taking photos of passers by and compositing them into a single image. This idea had been bubbling around in my head for a while now and evolved into this scheme to capture a cross-section of my local society during an event that is a first for me, as well as the district. As a single project it was a short but intense assignment.

There are two final images, one from the launch party and one from the weekend shooting in public. The figures for these are as follows:

Launch image:
• size - 1.18GB
• width in pixels - 108375
• height in pixels - 4335
• people in the image - 48
• total time shooting - 2 hours

Weekend image:
• size - 3.03GB
• width in pixels - 297675
• height in pixels - 4335
• people in the image - 136
• total time shooting - 12 hours

Although this is a single piece of work at the moment, however I would love to push this further and carry out similar sessions in towns and areas where family members are living. This would develop into a multicultural map of areas around the UK, and world, that is at the same time very personal to me but equally personal to those in the resultant piece of work.