Last Thursday, we had a communications pathway session with Gary and Kyung Hwa that was focused on drawing and navigating the city. I really responded to Gary’s sketchbooks and the way that he deconstructed and reconstructed observational drawings to create a collage of worlds and planes.
Kyung Hwa encouraged us to create these sorts of things by defamiliarizing ourselves with our environment and our typical approach to mark-making by closing our eyes and using our other senses to engage with walking around the studio and touching objects.
I found myself really drawn to corners and increasing sharpness as I navigated objects. Touching and drawing almost felt like an exercise in blind contouring, and it truly felt like exploration because there was nothing to get ‘right’. It was all about investigating and documenting our relationship to the object itself.
I have no idea how we made this one. Material Experimentation Created with Extended Marker Tool and Paint
After we did exercises in limiting our sight and drawing with only the inputs of smell, touch, and sounds, we were challenged to open our eyes once more but to use our bodies and materials in different ways in order to create marks on the paper. Together, Neveah and I made the images above.
Portraits of Communications Students Drawn with Right Foot and Markers
I particularly enjoyed drawing with my feet. It allowed me the comfort of sight without enabling the obsession of correctness. I liked the whimsical lines and distorted proportions that this difference in perspective created, and I liked how it developed a slant. I wonder how different it would be had I used by left foot.
After we had filled the room with this experimentation, the entire pathway covered the center table with white paper to create a collaborative work with all of these new techniques in mind. It was lovely to collaborate with this sense of play as the fuel for our work.
In our second round of experimentation, we dipped a pingpong ball in paint, and we rolled it to one another to create a spontaneous pattern. A Detail from Our Final Collaboration When Things Started to Get Very Weird….
In our collaborative piece, we first did a lot of individual experimentation. On our second go, however, we ended up making a but of a game of the process. We rolled a pingpong ball in paint and sent it to each other across the table like a giant game of foosball. Second, we connected ourself in string attached ourselves to drawing tools and moved around the table as one mass, like a giant Ouiji Board.
After that, we stuck painted objects to string and tried to collaboratively move them. It was messy, and wild, but it was so much fun to let go and explore this way. We also found some really beautiful moments in all of that experimentation and splatter.
I started making these little drawings of street performers in the style of the Charing Cross Mural by David Gentleman which depicts how the first physical Charing Cross was built at the sight for Queen Eleanor. Evidently, the Queen died outside of London, and her coffin was taken to London over a long journey, which required many stops. Wherever the coffin ‘paused,’ the King had a cross commissioned to be built in order to commemorate the journey, and Charing Cross was the sight where the coffin stopped in London.
The mural depicts the actual building of the cross according to 13th century building procedures.
I have always been struck by them as I pass the Charing Cross stop on the northern line because they are so graphic. It is interesting to me too that when one surfaces to Charing Cross, one is confronted with so many different monuments. The cross itself, which evidently is a Victorian replica, according to Historic UK, stands quiet in comparison to the loud grandeur of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. Even though it is the name of the underground and a general reference point, the two locations get mixed up, with the history of a story of a man monumentalizing his wife’s death underneath a monument of a war hero, elevated higher than any monument in the vicinity.
The competing histories struck a discordant chord. Too, the mural depicts the building of the cross. There are some important figures in the mix, but by and large it is a story of every day people–people who returned to the sight every day in order to use their specialties to create an identity for the space.
This brought me back to street performers. Perhaps these people are seen as low level entertainment, but they are the craftsmen of the sight for our day. They aren’t necessarily commissioned to be at the sight, but they do come because of the grandeur of the space.
I was interested in this historical intermingling, so I crafted these images of street performers who I have seen in my many visits to Trafalgar Square in order to originally be inserted into the original mural at life size. Some are more visible than others, but the point is to pick through the pieces and to question what this actually is and the ephemeral nature of craft and creation that go into a space. Weirdly, even the street performers are sort of people who are unseen except for their craft.
The images have only materialized as small stickers so far, and we have integrated them above and below ground in Charing Cross and Trafalgar Square as a hint to these adjacent histories and the dichotomy of above ground and below ground. But, I think they exist best as a whole image together, just as the history melds.
Perhaps I will print them out at a larger scale and install them above ground.
On Tuesday, in order to flip the experience we had the previous week on its side, we decided to go into Trafalgar Square on the offense. I had bought some sidewalk chalk in the though that we might draw something and participate in the square that way. However, we couldn’t think of something intentional that we would want to draw with sidewalk chalk. It is still an area for consideration, however, as is drawing shapes and mazes with water on the pavement that evaporate in a matter of moments.
For this particular experiment, I made a white sign with the word ‘CONVERSATIONS!’ written in black acrylic paint, and I planned to stand there and record audio while Neveah filmed. We had talked to Ian beforehand about the nature of real-estate in Trafalgar Square. On one level, the way that performers arrange themselves is just for maximal visibility because of its correlation with the most money you can get, and the way that tourists arrange themselves tends to be around where they can best see said street performers or where they can get the best photo from their holiday, to document the fact of their being in Trafalgar Square. There seems to be a transactional nature about this exposure.
So, we decided to go into Trafalgar Square with a hybrid incentive. We would take the positionally of street performers to be hyper visible, but what we were getting was more of the nature of the tourist, a documentation of our experience within the place. In order to incentivize people to talk to us, I created some stickers in the style of the David Gentleman’s Charing Cross mural that decorates the walls of the tube via the northern line under the surface, but instead of depicting people from 8 centuries ago in the construction of eponymous cross, I made street performers.
It was very awkward at first. However, there was a certain protective nature of the sign and the camera that established we were in control of the situation. Going up to people to ask them their opinions has always felt a bit intrusive to me. Inviting people in felt much more like a choice on both party’s positions.
Having a camera and a recording device definitely changed the dynamic of the conversation. The people that came to talk to us were quite aware of the camera, and they cheated out accordingly. The conversations felt more like performances rather than discussions, so perhaps when we run the experiment again, we won’t go out with devices. We can just rely on our memory to stitch together the performance. I know I wanted it to be more about interacting with people than documentation, so if we have to sacrifice the documentation piece, that is okay.
One of the most interesting things about this performance was how ‘visible’ we became because of the sign and the camera. I would say that the sign was an even stronger force than the camera. There was this natural curiosity about people who wanted to see why a person would be stopped in Trafalgar Square. I could hear people making remarks about me and taking pictures of me, though only a few ended up actually interacting. A woman that was sat behind us on the grass by the National Gallery came up, peeked around, and read aloud to her friends behind, “Con-ver-sa-tions!”, smiled, and went back without actually talking. It was a strange space to inhabit. Being still in a space, like the living statues, invited a passive looking. However, my face wasn’t concealed by a mask, and I wasn’t executing an expected performance, so people were often a bit taken aback about what to do. Perhaps this had something to do with the nature of what was on the sign. “Conversations!” could have been too vague. “Hey, how are you?”, “Stories!”, or “Want to talk?” could have all produced vastly different responses. I am curious to go out again with more explicit, directional language. But once again, I liked the notion of “conversations” because it didn’t necessarily imply who was starting, and that equal implication of performance and participation was interesting.
Overwhelmingly, I was taken aback by the kindness and openness of the people that did end up talking to us. Granted, there weren’t a lot of them, but the ones that did speak to us were incredibly respectful and enthusiastic. Some were just interested in the idea. At the end of the conversation, we gave people a choice of stickers to thank them for their time and to bring about that idea of reversal of street performance as well as underground and overground, and people were delighted to have them.
After the batteries on our devices died, we went around installing some of these stickers in and around the upper parts of Trafalgar Square as well as in the underground, knowing that they would probably not last very long, but the ephemeral nature of their ‘claim’ on a space is similar to that of the actual practice of the street performers.
After the sound workshop that we had last Wednesday, Neveah and I were inspired to go and investigate the territories of sound in Trafalgar Square as created by sound. We were interested in creating a column of sound, but recording sound at different heights–from the underground to the highest point that we could get.
So, we went to Trafalgar Square at around 2pm on a Thursday to take in some of our environment. We were planning to use apps on our phones to monitor our elevation, but it turns out that they were pretty inaccurate when we measured against each other. So, we will probably end up just looking up the different points of elevation if we do decide to create this column.
The sound distribution was interesting, as it wasn’t a super busy day. But perhaps the most interesting takeaway from the exercise was something that happened to us that we could not have expected.
The mic with the fuzzy cap made us very visible within the square–particularly around the lions. A young man, who could have been no older than 18, came up to us and asked us if we we were recording sound video. We told him that we were making audio recordings, and he said, “Please can you turn that off. I do not want to be recorded.” We obliged, not wanting to get into any kind of altercation.
He then told us that he had autism and that spaces like Trafalgar Square made him very uncomfortable–that he hated London, because it made him feel so alone. He said that he needed someone to talk to for 15 minutes.
We obliged him up to the point that he started leading us out of the square itself. At that point, our own safety was compromised. We said we were happy to talk, but in a public place, for the sake of our own safety. He was very frustrated by this, and we were quite shaken as well.
It was interesting how the public nature of Trafalgar Square transformed us into people that were also ‘there for the taking’ in a sense. There is a certain anonymity in crowds in which the code of behavior dictates that one does not speak to strangers. However, in this space, for whatever reason, there is a heightened sense of exposure, and perhaps an assumption that people want to be visible–most of the time, privately visible within the realm of selfies and private vacation conversations.
Because we were not expecting this kind of interaction, we felt vulnerable in this interaction. Unlike the street performers, we were not necessarily inviting people into our realm of conversation, but perhaps next time we would try to flip that expectation by going on the conversational offense.
When revisiting Trafalgar Square, I became quite interested in this idea of visual territory and division of space according to the competitive nature of the lucrative visual real-estate in the middle of London.
These are generalizations, but ‘being seen’ seems to be a big draw for the people that pause there. Of course, Trafalgar Square happens to be at a crossroads for many people to get to work, so for a population, it does just exist as a place where people happen to walk through. However, for others, tourists mainly, it is a place to check off the bucket list for being in London, to go and look at the column and take a picture with the lions. People also go there for victories, protests, etc, but there always seems to be an intentionality of choosing that monumental spot about ‘claiming’ and taking up a space. Its purpose is to show off the victory and heroism of English history, but it also seems to be that on a personal level for the people who pass through.
Is this intended greatness contagious? The street performers, the statues, and the tourists are the three ingredients that make up its ecosystem. But the semi-permanence of the street performers who return to this place every day is what interested me.
Floating yodas, grimm reapers, dancing pikachus and bears, are all garish, arguably irritating blights to the square, but they are a part of the ecosystem as much as anything else. The performers can be divided into the skilled/persistent. There are musicians and artists who show their faces, and there are the masked, who are engaging because of their removed humanity. They all seem to carve out enclaves for themselves within this square of exposure.
I decided to start observing/mapping the patterns of these people at different times of the day according to what they did visually.
Map of Trafalgar Square National Gallery Terrace
Perhaps I could take this idea of mapping and create ‘invisible’ boundaries with lasers, or slightly more visible ones with string to accentuate how different these performers are, and purposely set themselves apart from, their audience of tourists.
After Kyung Hwa gave her presentation before the long weekend, I was inspired to go and talk to this space that I seemed to naturally gravitate towards. Trafalgar Square stuck out to me as an interesting territory for a couple of different reasons: the ephemeral nature of the people there; the tacky, ‘cheap’ nature of the performance; the rhythms of setting up and taking down; the way sound travelled; the independent universes created within different squares of the square.
One of the things that really struck me about Kyung Hwa’s process was how much she talked to people, alongside just observing. I was curious to know how she did it/how she bridged that gap, and she said that because she was engaging with the space in such a visual and unorthodox manner, people approached her.
So, I set out to re-engage with Trafalgar Square in a manner that perhaps people would start to talk to me, or, rather, just talking to people.
I went back with this mentality in mind, and I was overcome with social anxiety about breaking into this world where there were clear barriers, whose presence I could feel, but I could not necessarily see. There were certainly people who were ‘fixtures’ of the square who had claims to bits of it–street performers who worked in the same spots every day, or had people who knew each other: a performance artist, who after her rollerblading set, went to go an sit down by a chalk drawer to give way to the main wall to a man on a bike. Interestingly, she was the only woman that I had seen as a performer in the square, the only one of these permanent fixtures, real statues included. I didn’t know how to break into this world as someone who was to interact with the space as someone studying its heartbeat.
However, my being there and observing people at a quieter part of the day allowed me to start to create my rivet in the space. However, I didn’t want to tread into some sort of my own colonization of the space.
The thing that stuck with me most after this visit was watching the street performers clear out as the tourism population dwindled.
There was a man demarcated his chalk space with cones, but at 8PM on the dot, he went to go and collect a mop and a pail of water, and he just started to obliterate the work. Mopping as erasure strange to see outside at this hour of night, with the moon reflecting in the pool of water he was creating. The whole process maybe took 10 minutes, but it struck me as quite a sisyphean task. I went up to him afterwards to ask him if he had to mop it up every night, and he said “No, it’s just polite, isn’t it?” It shed more light on this unwritten culture of the people who sit, rather than walk, in Trafalgar Square. That man also told me that he was out there quite frequently–that morning he had come out to ‘claim’ his spot at 7:30 am, drawn until 12:30 pm, and cleaned up at 8pm that night. He said he would do the whole thing tomorrow.
Taking these rituals of work and practice and putting them out in the open made the whole process so alien and so beautiful.
The chalk artist also took care to to protect other people’s squares form the running waters of his mop. I took this in stride in comparison to the copy of written laws about how street performance and square behavior is conducted in this urban space according to a very small document on one of the plinths in the square.
Digital collage of superimposed circles from Clapham Common Circles from up and down the Northern Line Alternate Juxtaposition of Circle Collage
We took a lot of photos on our initial walkabout in the Northern Line, but the motif of circles popped up multiple times as an interesting intersection between places. Neveah and I just found it quite interesting to engage with these circles by taking selfies in them. It was interesting that they encapsulated little worlds, though, truly their uniformity could make it such that we could be anywhere in London, or just in the same tube station. Taking above ground circles out of context allowed us to play with a similar concept. The circles could be from above ground, over ground, Stockwell or Clapham, and here in these collages, I was experimenting with them all lumped together as they are in memory.
Two Thursdays ago Neveah and I had a paired tutorial with Kyung Hwa, and we discussed different elements of what we had collected from the Northern Line, and many different elements came to life. We noticed a couple of patterns in things that we observed.
Mirrors in the tube stations were really interesting to us, as were water and other reflective surfaces over ground, as they have this really odd effect on people. It is my understanding that they are something of a safety fixture in the tube which enables people to see who is behind them, but Kung Hwa also made note that they have a pacifying effect. Mirrors in Korea are put up in department stores by elevators in order to alleviate anxiety for people who are waiting to get on. Perhaps they ultimately have the same purpose in the tube and in public. Mirrors make people stop because they offer this reflection, which is perhaps unexpected in certain places.
Shadows as we followed different paths during different times of day became increasingly interesting by odd architectural spaces and the ways that they intersected with light.
Kung Hwa also brought up the idea of shadows as something beyond this physical phenomenon of light, but also as people that live in out of ‘direct observation’. Who are shadows? Who are the ghosts? Who is permanently in the space but always shifting vs. who is only in the space at certain times of day.
Street art and street performance became an avenue of interest out of this, particularly with regards to the street performers in Trafalgar Square above Charing Cross. The ephemeral nature of these hyper-seen and hyper unseen people became an interesting juxtaposition that we have since been following.
On Wednesday, Neveah and I set out to explore the Northern Line. We started at Tottenham Court Road, and went south and around from there. We went out without a clear idea of what we were looking for, but we knew that we wanted to spend a significant amount of time above ground as well as navigating the underground, and we logged information using note-taking, video and audio recording, as well as picture taking. Both words and images became important ways of capturing our experiences.
We started at Tottenham Court Road, where I took the following note:
10:00 am
I came up the escalator at 10:00 AM to meet Neveah. I had taken the Northern Line from Clapham North, and as the train stopped, a boy’s untethered scooter rammed down the car to stop at my foot. I walked the scooter back to him and his mom and then returned to my place.
There was a boy tapping each spike on the escalator going up. His mom was not happy.
At the McDonald’s on Oxford street, a man came up to me to ask suggestively “Is this your lucky day? Is this your lucky day?” I couldn’t really understand him. Two police officers came out of the McDonald’s and intercepted him, saying, “Come on man.”
From there, I met Neveah, and we got on the Tube to start moving south. We stopped at Leicester Square and Walked to Trafalgar Square/Charing Cross.
10:51 am
A man shouts on the street by the National Portrait Gallery. It sounded like he was angry, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Maybe it was political in nature? He was by himself, though, which made people avoid him on the sidewalk.
Neveah and I stopped in the National Portrait Gallery, and then we went on our way to Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery.
I was personally quite transfixed by the street performers there, and the tensions that happened there: the private sound and visual spaces that the adjacent performers took up, the idea of performance/exhibition as well as hiding, the permanent collection of the national gallery and the statues and the ephemeral nature of the performances, and the levels of ground performance all under the elevated gaze of Nelson on his column.
One thing that I also have always loved is the the mural that is on the walls of the Charing Cross underground, offering a cross section of the history, all jumbled together, so it might be an interesting avenue to take this concept of the Charing Cross mural as a historical illustration and re-apply it to the current pace of life above ground.
Charing Cross Mural Detail from the Charing Cross Mural
11:43 am
On the way from Charing Cross the Embankment, a French child decided to use the poles in the train as monkey bars. His mother was also not very pleased at his gamification of the tube.
Next, Neveah and I got off at Embankment, where we walked across the bridge to the south side of the river. Along the bridge, we were really interested in these little ecosystems that seemed to exist on ledges of the train tracks, separate from the main bridge as well as the shadows along the way.
12:22 pm
A man eats an enormous lollipop on the tube from Embankment to Stockwell.
12:25 pm
Stockwell smells like cigarettes and perfume. It is a couple of decibels quieter, and it takes a moment to re-calibrate– like when you walk outside of a concert, and you are still shouting at the volume that was necessary in the venue.
Everything in Stockwell was lower, and it felt like we were more exposed. Also we payed more attention to the subtle sounds. Suddenly, the background noise of traffic came to the forefront as did the sound of leaves crunching beneath our feet.
Clapham Common was similar, and our experience there was primarily sitting and watching crows and people in the park there.
Then we turned around to go north via the other arm of the Northern Line.
We got off at London Bridge, and immediately we were thrown into different frequencies of human energy, sound, and light.
1:58 pm
Shangri La Hotel smells like vanilla. We were afraid to go in because it looked so fancy, and no one else was going in.
2:28 pm
We tasted oyster s in Borough Market.
From London Bridge, we went to Old Street.
3:00 pm
A hot gallery smells like art. There is no sound.
3:34 pm
A young boy ran into me at the stomach at King’s Cross.
3:46 pm
Lillies in a fountain nearby King’s Cross smell like water and pretzels.
4:19 pm
There is a smell of spray paint at Camden Town when you round into a quieter corner. There were some people spray painting over a wall, so it was unclear what they were making because of the hybridized layers of the old composition and the new. A man reached for a beer, but it looked like a spray paint can. That was alarming.
5:10 pm
Neveah and I passed some punks on the bridge back to the station, and they were holding a sign that said “Support Punk to get drunk.” We both found that clever.
Throughout the journey, we collected a lot of materials. However some themes and patterns started to emerge:
Mirrors and reflective surfaces
Shadows
Windows
Private vs. pubic art and performance
Overground and underground
Water
Birds
This is just a starting point, though. We still have a lot of thinking to do about where we would like to go with all of this stuff we have collected.
Exploring London vertically, in its cross sections of history, was augmented by the actual layering of artifact: Roman ruins are below the city, and as history progresses, we just build things on top. This really made me start thinking of a city in terms of the y axis rather than just the ground view.
We were also posed with the challenge of experiencing the museum through other senses beyond sight. I found myself really drawn to corners the walls and glass cases, thinking about how ‘hallways’ are square in their intersections, while things like the tube are round and produce curves instead.
It was also interesting to travel in the museum with Neveah, as we both do not come from London, and we both have only fractions of its history from the curricula we were exposed to.
In addition to the physical experience of walking around the museum, several of the objects were quite compelling when approaching them through the lens of time. I was particularly drawn to some of the old books and maps–looking at the different ways of representing information. We also found some wonderful objects, such as an old music box and board games. I am really interested in the confined cyclical nature of both of the objects, so perhaps they will become a scaffolding of thought for how we discover the city.
After leaving the museum of London, we went to the Barbican, which is really a space for navigation rather than exhibition (though there were exhibitions within the space).
Though the Barbican had so many adjacent, parallel, and intersecting worlds to explore as one navigates the different levels, I was overwhelmed by the interior space because it had such a specific smell. It was like a dense and synthetic plastic smell that I couldn’t shake. But, I did like the disorientation of navigating it. It felt like being in a video game maze, where I would be on a correct level, but unable to get to my destination, the library.
Sketching from the ground floor of the Barbican Sketching from the first floor of the Barbican Sketch of the main library at the Barbican
The outdoor components felt like the exposed and secluded at the same time. Juxtaposing the communal outdoor experience of the central courtyard with the more secluded upper layers was an interesting contrast of stimulus and sound. But there were these kind of juxtapositions everywhere. One of my favorite things that I saw while I was there were two piano players, each facing each other and playing the piano entirely in silence. They both had headphones that were connected to their individual pianos. And they were still making sounds, but just the sound of fingers tapping keys as opposed to the notes.
Sketch of a terrace on the second floor of the BarbicanFlowers from the terraces at the Barbican
These terraces were particularly interesting to me because of their proximity to the public center, and their intensely private feel. The quiet of these spaces was remarkable inside the city, and finding this point of refuge inside this point of refuge was an important shift in pace for my wandering and observation.
However, the entire time that I was there I couldn’t help but think to myself, ‘How on Earth does the postman navigate this place?’
RCA Graduate Diploma 