In the Sixties and Seventies he had long black hair that framed his distinctively narrow face with sunken cheeks, thick eyebrows, deep-set eyes and bulbous nose. Between 1980 and 1997 he held five and, shortly before he died, he was awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council fellowship at Central St Martins. At the end of the residency he combined his interest in the city with his abiding passion for Franz Kafka in a performance called Hidden Cities (1995), consisting of a riverboat tour that culminated in his reading from The Trial from the cathedral pulpit.Residencies and fellowships were Breakwell's staple. With the freedom to roam the cathedral, Breakwell's observations of the sick and the poor, the penitent and the devout found form in a tape-slide sequence called Deep Faith (2001). It was a change from his usual pint in the pub with a roll-up cigarette.The other residency to have made a significant impact on him was at Durham Cathedral, organised under the auspices of the Chaplaincy to the Arts and Recreation.
The series was shown at Kettle's Yard and then the Tate before travelling to Madrid for Breakwell's only one-man exhibition to be held abroad, at the Galer?Fernando Vijande but not before he had amusingly placed them alongside the 17th- and 18th-century portraits of King's College grandees in the dining hall one evening.Enjoying Cambridge to the full, Breakwell dined regularly at King's relatively low high table, partaking of vintage claret at meals - he wondered how the fellows' teeth survived this regular wash - and the ritual of passing the after-dinner port in a wheeled silver basket until it had been entirely consumed. Three of these outsized, masked faces were purchased by the Tate. It was a series of 20 imagined portraits bearing the slogan "Keep things as they are" that seemed to evoke and parody the prevailing threatening ethos of Thatcherite Britain. In a studio in the grounds of Newnham College that had once been a laboratory, he was cut off from the world.
With nothing to observe but the insular lives of students and dons that he met over meals in hall and satirised in his diaries, he felt compelled to create a cast of characters to populate the empty space.What emerged was 120 Days, named after the celebrated work of the Marquis de Sade. He was a modern-day fl?ur, a voyeur of the gutter rather than the keyhole, an observer of the minutiae of life. But when he took up residence at Cambridge in 1980, on a fellowship at King's College and Kettle's Yard, his art was to be transformed. Without knowing his destination or his purpose he began to photograph him until one day he failed to appear.