Trespassing Time with Friends: Growth, Land, Harvest, and the Darkroom of the Self
Or, how to last forever. This sub-post builds on previous installments of The Edgelands and is in response to my residency at the House of Annetta, a social centre focused on spatial justice and land reform in the heart of Spitalfields that I have been working from. For 40 years it was home to Annetta…
The Edgelands: Body As Edgeland
Or, what it was really all about: love. Welcome to Edgelands post #6. We are walking the edgelands, looking at the body as an edgeland both physical and metaphorical, the changing seasons, the who and why of edgelands, liminal spaces as healing spaces where we meet both others and ourselves, and physical pain as surrender.…
The Edgelands: Alleyways – Boundaries, Belonging & Disappeared Maps
Transitory Bodies // The Physicality of Wheelie Bins. Welcome to Edgelands post #5. This week I revisit an old hometown of Hemel Hempstead, itself an old edgeland till it was populated by post-war Londoners, look at how some maps show alleys and others don’t, why and how our bodies navigate down them, loving strangers, how…
The Edgelands: Nuclear Borderlands & Cumbrian Homelands
The Northern Nuclear Accident & Unmoored Wanderings. Welcome to Edgelands post #4. This week I wander through the radiation-soaked landscape of the Cumbrian Windscale disaster story holding my grandpa’s calloused hand, stopping off at an orchestra that makes music out of the frequencies from nuclear radiation. I look at the sorrow that comes from the…
The Edgelands: Hacking Hospital Maps & The Dérive
From Periphery Psychosis to Patterns. Welcome to Edgelands post #3! Today I talk about hospital maps, the dérive, map-hacking as an act of resistance and reclamation of the self, the edgelands of periphery psychosis, and the beautiful patterns all across nature, art, mathematics and music – and what these things all have to do with…
The Edgelands: Asylums – A Letter to My Uncle
From Shenley to Bethnal Green via Hill End – with Nellie Bly and David Chapman for company. Welcome to my second Edgelands installment, this time about Hertfordshire and London asylums, the history of Nellie Bly’s exposé of asylums in 1886 then David Chapman’s less than a century later, the power dynamics at play within the…
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