Traces: 1873- Wordless maps
For the last few years, I have been working on a project following the poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud through London as they knew it in 1872-73. I followed their traces through the city, seeing it with their eyes, hearing the words they heard, mapping out the areas they frequented. It has been a fascinating poetic journey and I even caught glimpses of a forbidden London within their texts..
During this quest, I accumulates a growing stash of materials, debris of my research: old images of London, maps, dictionaries, and of course the poems I pored over day after day as I interrogated the secret languages concealed within.
So when I embarked on a journey to discover etching last year, I summoned my poets to come with me, and decided to use this cache of material as a guiding light through my experimentation. I didn’t know where I was going, or what the result would look like, but I wanted to assemble these traces of 1873 London into a visual exploration.
This is the result.
After making each of my inverted prints, I was left with a little bit of ink on the plate, so pulled some copies of this nothingness, a ghost image of the previous artwork.
The results show the train station and the theatre disappearing right in front of our eyes, the brashness and vibrance of the earlier prints fading into ethereal colours. Like these prints, memory is always evanescent, and history can only catch a faded image of the past.. Our knowledge is always temporary, images brought to life and lost again, nothing studies and splendid stories.
They are hidden and they are not.