JANE PICKERSGILL

Our expanding cities are in a state of flux, constantly being rebuilt, and offered to us as an idealised, global way of living to which we should all aspire.  Throughout western economies, and increasingly in the developing world, these 21st Century urban environments conform to a type of space identified by anthropologist Marc Augé as the 'non-place'. They are haunted by the concept of the city as ‘a machine to live in’, an idea put forward in the mid 20th Century by architect Le Corbusier.  

 

Typically, these surroundings are places of transit, of hospitality - the spaces we habitually navigate whilst heading to an onward destination. Not a neighbourhood, in any sense of the word, and rarely home, they project an image of generic luxury (particularly in interior styling) which invite us to dream of such a possibility. Should we pause to consider them, these glass structures and bland streetscapes strike us as familiar in their ubiquity. They render the individual largely anonymous, except as a unit of consumption to be addressed whilst on the way from one place to another.

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Using steel, aluminium and perspex I build structures correlating to super-modern architectural constructions. Recent work asks whether the banal tendencies of these buildings can be redressed, via photographic practices, to impart a sense of the sublime. Observing these environs, I am attracted to fragments of buildings seen within the landscape, viewed as shadows, reflected in adjoining surfaces: intersections of object, encounter and experience which may go unnoticed.