Phenomena of Change: Drawing Dalston Part 1, 2008-2009
The arrival of five huge cranes at Dalston Junction, east London in 2008 signalled massive change to a once familiar neighbourhood. Monumental yet elegant structures, the cranes felt like symbols of the huge amounts of change about to come to the area. Seeing them every day, on the way to my studio, prompted me to begin drawing from the streets, focussing on the shifting relationship between new and existing buildings.
As the drawings progressed, I was invited to become artist in residence in the vast Dalston Square construction site - an exhilarating experience, literally climbing amongst the tower blocks as they were being built. It felt as though I had my own mountainside to climb in Hackney! The interior of the construction site seemed to run at a different time scale to the rest of the city, revealing a condensed, compressed version of the life cycle of spaces evolving over a longer time span throughout the city as a whole.
I made over 200 drawings, documenting the changes the area underwent between 2008 and 2011. The first group of drawings were exhibited in a solo show, ‘Phenomena of Change’, within a space in its shell and core on the Dalston Square construction site in 2009. Drawings from this series were also shown at CUBE Manchester (2009) the London Transport Museum (2010), Hackney Museum (2010), the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2011 and were awarded the David Gluck Memorial Bursary 2008. A second group of Dalston drawings culminated in ‘Archaeology of Urban Time’ a solo show at the Museum of the Home, London, 2011.
As I drew many people stopped to find out what I was doing, but also to tell me their memories, hopes and fears for the area. It felt as if the huge changes to the physical environment sensitised people living in the area to the space surrounding them and opened up a flood of memories associated with particular spaces.
Read extracts from my notes made whilst drawing here.
Click on each thumbnail for a closer look at a selection of the drawings from ‘Phenomena of Change’ …
