"In
fact, everything corroborates my view that the image of the city's roar is in
the very nature of things, and that it is the true image. It is also the
salutary thing to naturalize the sound in order to make it less hostile."
(Bachelard,
Gaston, The Poetics of Space)
I have included this quote because throughout my
investigations I discovered others like Gaston Bachelard and Virginia Woolf
have made these same comparisons with islands. I have also discovered that islomania
isn’t a weakness or just a desire for escape but a deep-rooted need to find the
emotional strength to contest and reconstruct a response to damaging
socio-political views and the way decisions are made concerning future of our
environment.
My work explores transitional states by experiencing place as an island. Here the island considered is in a suspended state before it becomes something else. What transforms the mundane of this particular urban island and makes it interesting are the differing human reactions to its uncertainty and how we make bridges between what is see/know and what we imagine. It offers a poetic image rooted in a romantic longings and imaginings - the suspension of belief increasing the desire to leave traces of happenings and memories because most of us have little control over what happens to these sites in our cities which are listed to be demolished and the sites rebuilt upon. The proposal is to suggest there is a way round this by creating and inhabiting urban islands, seeping these in metaphor and imbuing them with utopian dreams to overcome inertia, ennui and the ultimate destruction of our memory of a place.
My work explores transitional states by experiencing place as an island. Here the island considered is in a suspended state before it becomes something else. What transforms the mundane of this particular urban island and makes it interesting are the differing human reactions to its uncertainty and how we make bridges between what is see/know and what we imagine. It offers a poetic image rooted in a romantic longings and imaginings - the suspension of belief increasing the desire to leave traces of happenings and memories because most of us have little control over what happens to these sites in our cities which are listed to be demolished and the sites rebuilt upon. The proposal is to suggest there is a way round this by creating and inhabiting urban islands, seeping these in metaphor and imbuing them with utopian dreams to overcome inertia, ennui and the ultimate destruction of our memory of a place.
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| Island of Buildings (2011/12) Slide Projection |
