Facade - a body of work comprising sculptural objects and their installation into tableaux. Generated from a residency in Canary Wharf, the super-modern architectural site in the East End of London which rose like a phoenix out of the disused dock yards as a financial business district. Thematically the work is about physical and emotional transformation.

 

This photographic piece Telling a New Storey was long planned to be about the symbolically charged status of corporate urban architecture. 

 

The myth of Whittington still holds sway over us. In the city we can transform ourselves.

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The piece uses  projection, photographs and sculpture. The projections are symbolic of the city as palimpsest as well as asking the viewer to consider what is 'real',  what is an illusion, and what is  a reflection.  The photographed tableaux include sculptural abstractions of the building type, and caused me to question where the boundaries of still life and landscape lie.

 

The transparencies are printed in A4 format acknowledging the ubiquitous size of corporate 'documentation'. The arrangement echoes stained glass windows but the presentation behind perspex holders is pure 'real estate' luxury marketing in style.  

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Our expanding cities are in a state of flux, constantly being remade and offered to us as an idealised way of living to which we should all aspire. Throughout western economies, and increasingly in the developing world, urban existence is dominated by environments which anthropologist Marc Augé identified as the 'non-place'. Typically, these are places of transit, of hospitality; the spaces we habitually navigate towards another destination. Within these places the individual is rendered anonymous, a unit of consumption to be addressed whilst ‘on our way’. They are haunted by the architectural concept of the city as a machine to live in.

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Observing these environs, I am attracted to fragments of buildings seen within the landscape, viewed as shadows, reflected in adjoining surfaces: intersections of object, encounter and experience which may go unnoticed.

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Photographs available to purchase upon request. 

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