Lunchroom Takeout

Thanks to the team at Museum of London and Motiroti, Especially Dan, Liz and Tim.

This three part installation was created for  Streets of Gold at the Museum of London, I combined gallery installation with large-scale documentary photographs. The work draws parallels with destroyed cities, between Londoners’ experience of the 1940s World War Two bombing ‘Blitz’ and the impact of the 2011 earthquake in my hometown of Christchurch on New Zealanders. I incorporated photographs from the Museum’s collection from World War Two including Bill Brandt’s prints. To strengthen the link between the two incidents, I included a film element to the exhibition that consisted of  Christchurch residents’ stories spoken by Londoners.

I will have the audio and video up soon.

Posing question for installations and photos

“If the blitz reconfigured Britain’s cityscapes, how much did it reorder peopl’e attitudes and expectations? To what extent did the acute threat posed by an external enemy weld the British people into a seamless unity? Did bombs break down the stark divisions and class barriers of the pre-war years? Did a more altruistic society emerge from the ruins? In short, how much was the blitz a laboratory, a forcing house for change?  And was that changed sustained? Dd it light a candle that would flicker into the post-war years, lighting the years of austerity with reslution for reform?” (Page 366)

“Virginia Woolf, who felt the destruction of London’s buildings deeply, wrote to Ethel Smyth after the Woolfs’ house in Mecklenburgh Square had been hit by a bomb in September 1940: ‘London looked merry and hopeful, wearing her wounds like stars; why do I dramatise London perpetually? When I see a great smash like a crushed match box where an old house stood I wave my hand to London. What I am finding odd and agreeable and unwonted is the admiration this creates – for every srt of person: chars, shopkeepers, even more remarkably, for politicians – Winston at least, and tweed wearing sterling dull women here (in Sussex), with their grim good sense: organising First aid, putting out bombs for practice, and jumping out of windows to show us how. We burst an incendiary bomb up on the down(s) last night. It was a lovely autumn evening, and the white splutter of the bomb was to me, who never listened to the instructions, rather lovely. I’d almost lost faith in human being, partly owing to my immersion in the dirty water of artists envies and vanities while worked at Roger (Fry, a study of whom Woolf was writing). No hope revives again.” (Page 371)

How an artist saw the blitz

“…The next morning, Jones “went to see how a house was, and when I got there the front door was lying back, and the glass of the windows had fallen in, you could see the top of the house had virtually disappeared. Inside, everything as blown to pieces, you could see it all by the red glow reflecting from the fires that were raging outside. Then I looked out back and I suddenly realised that where my father’s shed and workshop used to be, was a pile of rubble, bricks. Then I saw two bodies, two heads sticking up, I recognised one head in particular; it was a Chinese man Mr Say, he had one eye closed, and I began to realise that he was dead…I just convulsed and couldn’t get my breath, I was shaking completely. Then I thought, well I must be dead, because they were, so I struck a match, and tried to burn my finger, I kept doing this with a match to see if I was still alive. I could see, but I thought, I could not be alive. This is the end of the world”” (page 27)

Thanks to Ian Berry, Fiona at Magnum Photos and Whitechapel Gallery for helping with this project.

I was only supposed to spend a week in Berlin, but I ended up staying for a month….. A playground for photographers and artists. I lucked out and hit Berlin right in the middle of the European International Photography month. Saw all the big guns. This serries of photographs is concerned with similar themes to my last post, the difference being how I was drawn to the boundaries and divisions of space. I am looking at these themes in terms of the interconectedness of space, history and politics. One would be hard pressed to find a better place to investigate these than Berlin.

Here are some photos taken through the Czech Republic and Eastern Germany in November. The photographs look at how physical structures can reflect the political agendas of a time and place. Both areas are still dealing with the repurcusions since the end of the Cold War, and this history can be encountered through the environments which exist there. (Apologies for the delay! Hard to edit when you’re on the move…)