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.
Next on my journey was looking up addresses where the poets lived. Most have now vanished, erased by the constant transformation of the city.
One address remains, on a Camden side street, with a stone plate bearing their names. I took some photos of the house as it stands now, 150 years after the few months they spent there, then set about finding the past within the image. I traced it onto paper then etched it in the metal plate, and added an aquatint to the plate, to bring form and shade to the image.
There is something quite melancholic about the aquatint process, which adds layers and layers of darkness on an image, until the right level of gloominess and contrast is built up. Verlaine used the name “eaux-fortes” (the French for acid etchings) for a series of poems in his first book, which all share a dark spirit: nightmarish, grotesque, nocturnal. My aquatint of this victorian house, lonely, damaged and moody is a sort of saturnian hommage.