Internet research of the local area.

One of the things Rosemary Fraser brought to the repair shop was a map of the local area, printed out from the Internet on the back of already used A4 papers and stuck together with cello-tape in a kind of grid. She said her husband had printed it out and that they had it on the wall until it started to fall apart, as things like these tend to do. I immediately liked the associations I got from this simple object spanning from our industrial past (the map was from 1870) and connecting with our post industrial and hyper communicative present. If the print-outs on recycled papers weren’t going to withstand the test of time, but instead showed how easily and directly accessible information has become, this was in itself an image of our age. Could I preserve it for the future by translating it into a material more typical of our past?

A lasting form of documentation.

I decided for ceramics, since this is a truly ancient material for recording information which also survives age and erosion better than most materials favoured by mankind. It also lends itself unusually well to map-making, if one wants. There was also something about the sheets of paper coming apart as the cello-tape dried, that reminded me of ceramic tiles. I figured that if I cropped the map a bit at the top it would fit just fine on nine 15x15cm clay tiles.

The texture is very visible up close.

I set about transferring the map, topography included, onto clay slabs. This was a very time consuming task. I made five of the tiles myself, and had four different assistants making one tile each. I was careful to make sure we all worked in the same style, showing the assistants in detail how I sculpted all the different elements of the landscape, not because I thought my way would necessarily be better, but because if we all worked in a similar way I hoped the results would also be similar. To my astonishment it worked so well that the finished tiles were almost inseparable in style.

Since the tiles are monochrome, texture is all.

Just as the paper map once hung on the wall, I imagine that the tiles would also belong on the wall, but maybe integrated with the bathroom tiles or over the kitchen sink. Since the map shows the local area, including the house where Ms Fraser lives, it wouldn’t be wrong if the ceramic map was allowed to become part of that house.

Newhaven harbour, in the old days.

As an additional curiosity, when she saw the tiles, ESW’s director Irene Kernan told me that a medieval pottery had once been located at the site of the new ESW building. I found it comforting that random decisions by visiting artists will always turn up meaningful coincidences that can be included in the stories of artworks to widen the way we read them.

Object no. 7