Pen and pencil on paper, 2018
Framed drawings for sale £800 unframed £750
44×32 cm framed
Two hundred years ago, in 1818, the same year that Mary Shelly published Frankenstein, these smoke-belching Regency houses were marching out of London into the countryside. The fields were mined for clay to fire for bricks, like the advance- troops of an accelerating industrial economy.
These drawings are reworked from a photograph of the terrace taken in 1958, that showed a smog stained structure mended with remedial brickwork, the building shaken by a WW2 bomb that exploded to the rear. This is the North London terrace that I grew up in—seven years before my parents moved in.
The house (on right) in its place on the street is formative to my work, linking interests in architecture, history, and our place in nature. Its small interior spaces, covered in 70’s wallpaper and my father’s DIY sensibilities, stack in my imagination to form a castle tower, or rocket. The exterior back space transforming from a yard complete with air-raid shelter and covered-over-coal- cellars, to that of carefully tended garden.
These drawings play with the building’s entire block, unleashing the contents of the house back at itself. What is possible, where are we going? In celebration, ruin, and revamp, through the rise and fall of economy, human conflict, and cultural flux: snapshot views of parallel worlds.