Common Places
An Exploration
It started with a question mark, a second look at the landscape followed by a personal dialogue with it. It is a landscape that I am familiar with, and the conversation concerns how we perceive the world around us. The landscape around us is as much a fantasy and a fiction as it is actually experienced. This is the suburban green belt dream.
The romantic style of landscape still aspired to, harking back to a time before, taught us how to design magnificent outdoor spaces as well as the smallest family garden. It taught us how to achieve beauty with the simplest and commonest of means: the landforms and vegetation everywhere surrounding us. But has it brought us closer to nature?
Common Places is an exploration of everyday spaces, car parks, roads, recreation grounds, gardens; some areas we inhabit. Here are the lamp standards, park benches, dog waste bins, fences, radio masts, bollards, signs and other street furniture. A tour unfolds of modern monuments to our present culture that amount to a pattern of tokens and traces.
2009
