Lonsdale Street
Artist’s book: Laser etched and cut paper (from wax rubbings and sound recording), 30x12x15cm, 2018.
Diverting from the characterising Romantic poets before her, Mary Oliver wrote that ‘[t]he sea isn’t a place but a fact, and a mystery’. Our experience of the local is the same, inherently refusing to acknowledge the boundaries between the observing self and the reality of nature. The local exists implicitly in our imaginations, mediated by our marks on the land around us. By being regionalised into localities, the place presumes itself into a constructed communal space, disengaged and coddled as soon as it is defined.
In this work, I collected impressions from the cement of the street and visualised a recording of the sounds in the air as I walked. This collection draws a space that is intentional and twofold, presenting both the experience of a place’s momentary definition that is familiar but unique to the observer and the concrete materials that exist under the feet of all who pass. To make our spatial imagination more full, we must always hint at the mystery of the multiple histories that will compound upon a plot but see it’s land as a fact, independent of our ideations.
Rubbings from the cement of Lonsdale Street, August 2018
The typed lines etched into the final book.
Photographs: Rory Gillen