In 2018 and 2019, Helen Sear spent several weeks inside the warehouse of The Scrap Exchange in Durham, North Carolina, an organisation that diverts surplus materials from landfill. The floor of that four-thousand-square-foot space is covered in blue-flecked linoleum printed with maps of the world, a patchwork worn down by countless footsteps until the surface beneath begins to show through like new oceans eroding a drawn landmass. Sticky price labels and other debris drift across this shifting cartography. That image of a world map dissolving underfoot is the axis of *Era of Solitude*, published by Dewi Lewis in 2021.
The book is not a documentary record of the warehouse so much as an encounter staged within it. Sear built a makeshift studio on the shop floor and invited visitors to sit for portraits, photographed hands holding objects they had chosen, and sometimes recorded brief conversations. Working in the formal register of studio portraiture, she holds her subjects still against the visual agitation around them; direct eye contact between sitter and photographer becomes the point where a shared moment registers. The sequence of portraits, objects, and fragments of exchange gathers the scattered evidence of a place into something close to a portrait of a community.
The title carries an ecological argument. Sear reflects on the current ecological crisis and our shared responsibilities across countries and borders, calling for human collaboration to avert the permanent loss of other species, in an era that the biologist E. O. Wilson suggested might be named “The Age of Loneliness.” The Scrap Exchange, in this reading, is a microcosm: a local answer to a question about consumption, waste, and responsibility that extends across borders. Her practice has long concerned the co-existence of human, animal, and natural environments, and it draws on Magic Realism, Surrealism, and Conceptual Art rather than on reportage.
Sear studied fine art at Reading University and at the Slade School, University College London, and came to prominence in the late 1980s through mixed-media installation, performance, and video. Her photographic work reached a wider audience in the British Council exhibition *De-Composition: Constructed Photography in Britain* (1991), and in 2015 she was the first woman to represent Wales with a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale. *Era of Solitude* is a hardback of 144 pages with 75 duotone and 19 colour photographs.
