Upright Gallery in Edinburgh’s current exhibition showcases Stephen Deazley‘s photographs of graffitied crosses marked in ink, chalk, pencil and nail polish scratched into wood and stone or drawn with a finger into the grime of a telephone box window.

Deazley has encountered crosses at thresholds to tenement flats, on the sides of bins, or positioned with a graphic and sometimes comic eye, responding to other graffiti or to peeling building render. More like private meditations than public declarations of faith, they suggest a loneliness as much affirmation in equal measure, often alluding to parts of a city’s untold stories. 

This is the first public exhibition for Stephen, who is a Scottish-based choir director, music educator and composer, involved in community music-making. He grew up in a Belfast Catholic household in a culture rich with icons and biblical imagery, and while he is not, these days, religious in any way, he finds these crosses and the mark-making very moving, and collecting them has become a meditative ritual – of walking, noticing, and bearing witness to those who made them and to the moments in time when they were made.

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