For over fifteen years John Spinks has been photographing the small mining village in North Warwickshire where he spent his childhood. He left aged 18 to study, and in 2000 began the process of engaging with his past through his work.

Spinks' large format colour pictures are both sober and beautiful, suggesting the possibility of an uncanny hidden narrative in both the landscape and its inhabitants. They are a melancholic meditation on belonging and identity, somehow familiar yet oddly unsettling. In both his portraits of the villagers — some of whom he has known since childhood — and the countryside that surrounds them, he captures a brooding, intense quality: through his lens we are granted intimate access to a guarded world.

Even though he grew up within the confines of the village, his gaze is simultaneously that of a local and an outsider, reflecting his experiences as a child and the adult he became. He explores the darkness and light of his past through the present, articulating notions of a particular kind of Englishness.