Deptford Sounding

This work develped out of my repeated wandering and gleaning from Depford High Street to the Thames riverbank. The sculptural assemblages I made from objects collected along this route reflect the play of human and nonhuman processes that shape this urban landscape.

As the substrate through which the Thames flows as well as the foundational building material of the city, I use clay to unite the various elements of the exhibition. The walls are covered in a mixture of raw clay and London brick dust, and many elements are crafted from local clay, either fired, or raw.

The album is composed of a soundwalk through Deptford which is interjected with pieces for electronically modified flute.

This exhibition was presented with the following text:

Exhibition Guide

While I was developing this installation, I realized that it was going to be very hard to make an accurate guide/map. This was partly because things are so fragmented and jumbled, largely because everything was being pieced together right up till the end, and also because my design skills are profoundly limited. I thought it would be best to try to talk through pieces as a way of making sense of the space without the visual repetition of a map, while also opening it up a bit contextually.

The walls themselves are called Tom’s Contribution. For those not familiar with Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, there’s a scene where the eponymous character ends up getting all his friends to whitewash a fence he was told to paint as punishment for prior misdeeds. He manages to convince everyone that nothing could be more fun than whitewashing the fence and through this advertising, ends up doing none of the work himself. The walls are made from salvage clay from Goldsmiths, ground up brick dust from bricks found in the Thames, and bone china, a substitute for porcelain first developed along the Thames using slaughterhouse refuse a couple hundred years ago.

From the left, the first two pieces on the walls are made from butterfly bush. If you go outside, you’ll see it blooming all over right now, particularly on rail-lines and in crumbling brickwork. The lower piece is called bouquet, the upper one ladder 1.

Next are all the pieces suspended by strings a bit off the walls (except for the bones). As a whole this part of the installation is called long distance salvation. The title’s from Bruce Springsteen’s Open All Night. The pieces are little bouquets of gleanings from the Thames riverbank down from Deptford High Street.

The piano action with yellow mimosa flowers is called chatter. The piano action was found on Deptford High Street and the mimosa tree lives in a backyard off Margaret McMillan Park. Above and below it are two little swings. They’re called The Swing (1 and 2, respectively). The wicker room partition embroidered with the course of the Thames from London out to sea is called partition. The wheel above is called Big Wheel.

Ivy said about the string piece connecting the two walls “if it were a snake it woulda’ jumped out and bit ya” and thus it was named.

All the things nailed to the wall on the far left of the smaller wall don’t have a name. It’s not that they don’t deserve one, I just don’t think they need one. These pieces, too, are all found along the Thames riverbank. The one thing that might have a name is the piece of black cloth with white paint, you could call it Thames Walk.

The white board with red string up high is called Crimson Tide. To offer a small amount of context, I am from Alabama, where the state flag is a red X on a white field and where the state’s university is known for its sports teams, referred to as the Crimson Tide. The chair below is just called chair.

The hanging branches next to the right each have a different material tied into them: brick shards, ceramic fragments, bits of coal, river clay. This piece is called besom after traditional brooms often made from bundled birch twigs, as these ones are.

At the end of the wall is ladder 2. This one is made of birch instead of butterfly bush like the other ladders. (ladder 3 is hanging from the ceiling).

The cups on the floor lining the walls and on the beam above the chairs are thrown stoneware and are oxidation fired. They are filled with Thames water and called proper brew.

The red hanging stool is called bird’s nest and below it is the assemblage party shoe.

The collection of objects in the center of the floor is called vessels. It is made of various thrown ceramics, some fired, some not, all coated with dust from bricks ground up after being collected from the Thames riverbank. There are also bricks, bits of Thames chalk and a couple Thames and High street collected items.

The pallet suspended from the ceiling is covered in brick dust, too, and is called all that is solid.

The sound piece is called Deptford Sounding, as is the installation as a whole.