Deptford X 2011

It has been awhile since I posted here...

In July I put in a proposal to Deptford X 2011. The festival happened over two weekends at the end of September, and I didn't take part. Not being selected came as a relief since my design work had become very busy and I was also doing quite a bit of local campaigning (and still am)...and the idea I had was for another installation in the Creek that would have required a lot of work.

The "lead artist-curators" were (and still are) Hew Locke and Indra Khanna. Their brief was as follows...

Surrender to the pleasure of the decorative. Revel in the excessive, embrace it, be dazzled. A stall stacked with lurid artificial flowers, rhythmic serpentine graffiti, baroque mermen carved over the old town hall door, all equally a joy to the eye. Indulge yourself.

But there is more than just the surface. Layers of decoration contain levels of meaning, messages and codes. Symbols of power, conspicuous consumption, signals of elitist knowledge, patterns of control, signs of social belonging.

Is it all just too much? Visual overload, information overload, too much to digest – too much work, not enough time. Are our eyes bigger than our stomachs?

Here was my idea...It was not particularly decorative!

Deptford Creek forms the eastern boundary of the Deptford parliamentary seat presently occupied by Joan Ruddock MP. An imaginary dotted line runs through its middle.

The coalition government aims to reduce the number of MPs, and on September 6th 2011, boundary changes will be announced. The Deptford parliamentary seat is predicted to become Greenwich & Deptford. 

I propose to draw the present boundary line in the Creek with an object often found in the Creek, that is, crockery. The plates would be white (or possibly coloured and patterned) and be placed every metre along the imaginary line. The line would be viewable from Laban, from the Ha'Penny Hatch, and from the carpark at Faircharm.

The line would also only be visible at low-tide, and invisible at high tide. Over the duration of the festival, the line will be distressed and displaced by the tidal water and become indistinct as the plates become covered in mud, and eventually disappear, much as the present political boundary is predicted to.

The Creek as a political boundary has become a symbol of power, signalling patterns of control, creating a specific sense of place (and social belonging) to those living either side of it, despite the bridges that cross it. Rivers have long divided cities and countries, but has this particular division been natural or artificial? The Creek's role may now change as it becomes the centre of a much larger area, and a hub of luxury development. Do we care about this gerrymandering? Will we notice the difference?

(click to enlarge)

Creekery #2: refraction

Picture by Charles Shearer

Gaudi: July 2011: Casa Batlio

 

Gaudi: July 2011: On the roof of the Pedrera

Mark Wallinger: Folk Stones

On permanent show at Folkestone is Mark Wallinger's 2008 Triennial offering Folk Stones. The precise number of beach pebbles collected and laid out into a massive square reveals a profound underpinning: 19,240 individually numbered stones stand for the exact number of British soldiers killed on 1st July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme. The work is inspired by the one million soldiers who left from Folkestone harbour to fight on the battlefields of France and Flanders.

Cornelia at Folkestone

Let's Talk About the Rain

Parlez-moi De La Pluie – a film by Agnes Jaoui (2008). On the telly the other night. Am pretty sure that's a Willow Pattern plate on the wall there...

Drawing on the beach

Emma and Elisabeth were up at the South Bank this evening watching the Parkour...and saw this...

Made In Britain and China's PM visit

Great programme with the lovely Evan Davis, looking at the British economy, and in particular what is going on in China. Of the mighty sale price of the iPhone, most goes to the retailer and pays for the components, then $85 goes to Apple, and $5 to the Chinese company who assembled it.
Pointless making a link to i-Player, but anyway...Made In Britain.

Meanwhile, the Chinese are in town for trades deals, shaking hands with Cameron and getting the old horse guards parade treatment.

PM signs China deals but urges respect for human rights (link here to BBC report)

"After meeting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao for talks, Mr Cameron hailed what he said was a 'deeper dialogue'. But he said political and economic progress must go hand in hand as respect for human rights was 'the best guarantor' of prosperity and stability.

"Mr Wen urged co-operation and dialogue over the issue, not 'finger-pointing'.

"During talks in Downing Street, the two leaders signed bilateral trade agreements worth £1.4bn and restated their desire to double the value of two-way trade between the countries by 2015...."

BBC News reported this without irony and seemed at a loss as to what Mr Wen might be inferring, what with their piling up of political prisoners such as Ai Wei Wei.

Could it be, ahem, the British treatment of the Chinese some 200 years ago or is more likely, ahem, our treatment of terror suspects? Or could it be, ahem, our government's enormous disregard for trades unions, and the voice of protest (the same voices so right about Iraq)? Pointing the finger indeed, Mr Cameron, as you close down education, libraries, the health service and the arts, and cut local authority grants to ribbons, for the sake of your banker mates.

In his speech about how different our countries and cultures were, Cameron failed to refer even briefly to our shared history – why, for fear of shaming the Chinese? Or because, when the Chinese have been bank rolling the Western world for ten years now and is about to become the No.1 economic power in the world, it is hugely embarrassing to speak of an once vain glorious, now inglorious past.

It's not in the school curriculum, that's for sure.

Lawes Chemical Co. at Harold Wharf

Christopher Mazeika from the Shipwright's Palace contacted me on Facebook to tell me to bid for this ashtray on eBay. For around £7 inc p&p I resurrected my PayPal account to snap up this small representation of my family name in Deptford. I have lived here 30 years and had no idea.

It was admittedly very exciting to find that my namesake (as yet connection unproved) John B Lawes had a chemical works on the very site where I have just exhibited. It is in fact, TOO WEIRD.

John Bennet Lawes founded the chemical fertiliser industry in 1842, with the development of wet process phosphoric acid technology. He was a self taught agricultural chemist and early Victorian entrepreneur who patented a process whereby ground coprolite was mixed with sulphuric acid resulting in a more soluble form of calcium phosphate or "superphosphate".

Coprolite is fossilised animal dung and composed chiefly of calcium phosphate along with minor quantities of organic matter (it is possible to infer the diet of the animal which produced the coprolite on examination). Superphosphate production factories were rapidly built around the country, where coprolite could be extracted. It had been discovered in 1840 that crops grew more strongly where the coprolite existed, but the mineral was not insoluble in water so couldn't be used until Lawes found a way to make it work. Bone ash was also used and many industries around the creek were based on using the discarded body parts of cattle.

Lawes was the founder of fertiliser (although wikipedia has some bloke called the Rev John Stevens Henslow as the one to patent the extraction process, so some more research is required!).

Lawes' first chemical works straddled the south of the present Faircharm site and the north of APT's site. This predates the present APT building.

I saw a map today at a consultation exhibition by Thames Tunnel (Thames Water) at Creekside Centre which showed the chemical works, but I've yet to track this map down. Rather ironic that Lawes made a fortune out of fossilised shit, and now I'm living in Shit Central, this area being one of the largest concentrations of sewage confluence...resulting in one of the few areas on the Thames discharging effluent into the Thames during heavy rain. The overflow is next door to the Ahoy Centre, where I have mudlarked on many an occasion and where some of my pottery fragments have been found.

At the Thames Tunnel consultation today I learned that the tunnel will merely be an overflow pipe, and not as I thought, a giant tunnel of shit channeling all out to sea. On the contrary.

After Creekery I thought my name would be associated with mud (my name is mud), but now it appears it is historically associated with shit. On my doorstep.