Notes on Labour and Longing brings together a series of Richard Hancock’s photographic works on - and with - paper, that stage the body and its traces as material encounters with labour and desire. Creased papers, crumpled bedsheets and cast-off tarpaulins become poetic signifiers for lives lived, endured, and sometimes left behind. The works on show in this exhibition lightly carry the weight of the everyday, while holding the mass of abstract longings.

First conceived as a series of 5 poster prints on affiche paper, Offcuts was displayed on the security fence of a derelict gas station, across the street from the artist’s apartment in the Neukölln district of Berlin. The images depict a nude figure wrapped in discarded print paper. Drawing on classical painting and contemporary advertising, the posters presented an interruption in the flow of promotional images that regularly occupied the site, and were a fragile reminder of its unacknowledged and vulnerable inhabitants. In the years since the site closed, it became an unofficial shelter for the homeless, a place to shoot up, a party venue, a photo opportunity, a murder scene; a revolving window into the wider troubles of the gentrifying neighbourhood around it. A palimpsest of bodies and paper, marked by transience, fragility, and anonymity. The images hung amongst the twisted remains of promo posters and show flyers; papers published in the elements, working until failure. In transferring the works from the street to the gallery — from commercial print to archival pigment processes — further questions are asked about value, context, and the shifting realities of bodies and images, and their consumption.

Titled after Virginia Wolf’s experimental classic, The Waves: Six Soliloquies is a series of folded photographic prints, depicting tumultuous scenes of bedsheets. In the closely cropped black and white images, the folds of the sheets mimic the visual rhythms of waves. The literary heritage of the works is alluded to in the folding of the prints themselves, which creates a further layer of reverberation, echoing the outlines of the waves contained within. Both endlessly dramatic and painfully pedestrian, the images draw a fold between hysteria and the everyday. The melodrama of the sea and microcosm of the bed are staged as the melting point of human affects.

A series of diptychs draw images from Feiertag (Pentecost) — photographs taken during a sweltering public holiday in Berlin, documenting the absent labour of an empty construction site, referring back to the working life of the artist's absent father who died in 2012. For this exhibition, each image is paired with a new reference image, each taken in the intervening years in the home of the artist.

The final works on show, Untitled (Wait ‘Til Your Father Gets Home), depict the artist holding the watches worn by his father and grandfather. The work holds the care and veneration of objects sometimes typical of working class men. The title carries both the weight of mourning and the implicit threat of violence; the matriarchal voice that doubles and empties patriarchal time in working class homes. For this version, the images are produced as large scale prints on paper, that are crumpled and presented as sculptural forms, mirroring the materials used in Offcuts.