Here Where You Are Standing at The Modernist

Here Where You Are Standing brings together a body of acrylic landscapes by Salford-based artist Peter James Houghton, shaped by themes of societal decline, hiraeth and human isolation in the post-information age.

The focus is on buildings that once served thriving working-class communities but now stand neglected – bruised by the elements and scarred by generations of wear. These are places caught between use and erasure, rendered in scenes of near-total stillness. Condemned post-war housing, vacant shopping precincts and fading seaside resorts are rendered in stark stillness, pointing to both a crumbling past and a a precarious future.

This isn’t abstract territory for Houghton. Raised in Lancashire, he witnessed the slow unravelling of working-class towns and explored abandoned cotton mills and factories along the Leeds-Liverpool Canal. That early fascination with derelict landscapes and psychogeography sharpened after moving to Salford two decades ago, as waves of regeneration transformed large parts of the city. The work is driven by an impulse to record places in their current state, before they are flattened into what he describes as “a mere ghostly footprint”.

There’s a clear hauntological charge running through the work. These are spaces built with a forward-looking confidence – homes, leisure complexes, civic centres – that now read as tragic optimism. The future they promised never arrived, leaving behind structures that feel temporally out of joint. They aren’t ruins yet. They’re worse than ruins: buildings still standing, but drained of purpose. In that sense, Houghton’s paintings sit close to the cultural condition described by Mark Fisher in Ghosts of My Life – environments haunted not by nostalgia, but by unfinished futures lingering in concrete and signage.

The absence of people matters. Human life is everywhere implied by the architecture, yet never quite materialises. What emerges instead is a sense of suspension – not moments of collapse or drama, but places stuck in an endless present. As Houghton puts it: “The recurring theme of neglect and loneliness runs throughout my work just as it seems to run like blood through the veins of many 21st century Northern communities, giving places a sense of ghostly melancholia.”

Shown at The Modernist on Port Street, Here Where You Are Standing is a quiet, sobering exhibition about what gets preserved, what gets forgotten, and what it means to stand among spaces that refuse to disappear cleanly. All works are for sale.