Entry Title: " Where Ships Were Born [Revisited]"
Name: Paul Alexander Knox, United Kingdom
Category: Non-Professional, Industrial


Entry Description: Sunderland has a proud 600 year history of shipbuilding, which in the early 1900's employed 12,000 men; over a third of the town's adult population. Now the workforce is a mere half dozen and their future is uncertain. The once opulent offices that stood like Mary Celeste style shrine for over 20 years have now been demolished. The Dry dock still functions but now only as a demolition site. The industry is in it's final years. I left my home town of Sunderland a few years after the industry was all but closed down to find employment. I returned over
13 years later to begin the journey to document this, the last working shipyard in Sunderland.

I am predominantly a documentarian working to examine social and cultural structures both locally and globally. In the North East I have focused on industrial history. I am currently exploring the changing social structure impacted by the loss of industry as seen though changes in social housing and land use. I have also created a substantial portfolio of international work exploring the communal nature of the developing world focusing on how religion is practiced, trade is created and life takes place on the street. I have documented the changing industrial identity of the Northeast as articulated through Pallion Engineering, which is the last working shipyard in Sunderland. Within that project I focused on both the structural remains, and current work taking place on Wearside. This project culminated in exhibitions and a self-published book. This work is on-going as the future of the yard remains uncertain. Currently I am creating work that highlights the different phases of social housing and regeneration which saw social housing being built to accommodate industry, the selling of those houses to families in the 1980’s and the governmental reacquisition and demolition of those homes in the early 2000’s. The further phase was to be rebuilding which has stalled in the economic down turn resulting in abandoned spaces where homes once stood. I am examining those spaces left behind, and the broken promises of the local authorities and developers. Working title: The Space Between/The Promised Land. This work is on-going. I have travelled extensively and have produced internationally acclaimed work from Asia, America, Mexico, Africa and England. The latest of this work was shot and processed entirely using a camera phone, and self-published in a book.