The Pyramids Project (WIP)

2024 - Ongoing

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Photographed across Britain, The Pyramids Project explores postmodern pyramidal buildings as monuments to a utopian vision. Constructed in the 1980s and 1990s, these structures now reveal their latent mythology, exposing how echoes of ideology, mysticism, and imperialism became embedded in retail parks, financial districts and leisure spaces.

The pyramid - a form long associated with permanence, transcendence, and civilisational power - was imported into imperial culture. Once sacred geometry, it was reconfigured into a signifier of dominance. In late twentieth century Britain, this symbolism was revived and flattened within the neoliberal landscape, materialising as cinemas, shopping centres and banks. Though privately constructed, these buildings stood as totems to the promise of trickle-down economics in a post-industrial landscape. Severed from their historical origins yet saturated with mythic resonance, they offer the illusion of progress - bridging fantasy with consumer spectacle.

This series assembles a constellation of architectural fragments in an effort to make sense of the recent past and the abstract present. These structures are not just visual curiosities; they are the fruiting bodies of a broader cultural condition in which dormant ideologies reassert themselves under new guises. By isolating and recontextualising these forms, the work uses photography and architecture as tools of inquiry - mapping how fantasy, and economic myth were actors in everyday built environments.

JJ Helliker