Featuring Sahana Skanda, ‘Soft Concrete’ was orchestrated to reflect the tenderness of ageing suburban mazes. Crowded driveways with front yard toys reaching to dusty windows. The wet beating heart of sticky tarred roads. The familiar decay of rusting clothes lines. The rising lungs of freshly mowed earth. The fragility of becoming an adult in the same suburb you turned 12.

I’m very struck by the old country homes that remain in my local suburbs. Endless property development has become among the worst of modern plagues, inching its black ink suffocation closer to every humble corner of the land. People are continuously being pushed out of their homes, off of the farm land that their family name has known for generations, bright orange cranes in every horizon, infinite noise and the constant desire for something more. Delicately worn homes are pulled from their roots, stripped and sterilised, stamped with a glowing red dollar sign, buried in cold metal, wrapped in blue mesh gauze, marked “Bathla”. Many of my neighbours have accepted this fate for the sake of progression or simple indifference to the unstoppable force of capitalism, but something in my soul can’t help but weep at the lost humanity, a fragility that will never return. Soft lines, walls peeling with pale paint, brittle window panes and front steps worn down from frequent visits, consumed in big unforgiving bites, replaced with towering grey bricks that block the sun. I make a conscious effort to stop and admire these homes as they sit quietly on soft concreted death row. I’m grateful to have dedicated this project to my time among these homes and I hope that these pictures are able to remind me of how they made me feel, long after they’re gone.