Patterns of Play

The markings on the floors of sports halls mostly go unnoticed but you can’t of course play a series of different sports on a single court without them. Colourful and full of natural graphic potential, close up they offer a poignant index of passing time: worn and imperfect, they have been marked by thousands of scuffing trainers and the odd anger-slammed racquet. I shot these images in sports halls all over the UK, cropping to produce images that deliberately nod to the geometric work of artists such as Piet Mondrian, Jean Gorin and Theo van Doesburg. These layered markings work on a near-universal colour-coding system: red for netball, black for basketball, white for badminton, green for volleyball, yellow for tennis and blue/yellow for 5-a-side football