Hanbury Terrain

Jane Mulfinger and Graham Budgett

18 – 23 December 2005 & 5 – 15 January 2006

Private View: Saturday 17th December 4 – 6pm

"Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred."
(Walter Benjamin)

- time as a factor of depth a site-specific work regarding the nature of the changing landscape and subscape of the East End

The future of an ordinary intersection on Hanbury Street in the East End of London lends form to a collaborative work by artists Graham Budgett and Jane Mulfinger. Video projection, sound, and sculptural elements take us from Elizabethan mapping to the present day and on to future plans for tunnelling under this dense urban territory. To know a city well is to understand its topography, to recognize sections of pavement, to remember its rhythm in spatial and auditory terms. Drawing a map is one way of knowing the town, understanding it 'from the ground up'. This work takes the sense of horizontal vastness implied by London maps and contrasts it with a massive vertical displacement of earth destined to be extracted from this area. How will the topography of the cityscape change with the construction of a new underground rail link?

Displacement of a large volume of earth, an earthwork so to speak, will begin above ground with the construction of a shaft at the corner of Spital and Hanbury Streets in 2007. Via this shaft a massive volume of earth - approximate 1,600,000 cubic meters gouged from here to Liverpool Street Station - will be extracted and dispersed through local streets. The importance of the new rail link is being weighed here against the upheaval created in an already stressed urban neighborhood. This act of displacement and dispersion holds an abstract metaphorical significance for an area of London that is, historically, a home to migrant masses. More poignantly it will have a very real material impact on local lives over a prolonged period of time.

In the gallery, an aerial view of the corner of Spital and Hanbury Streets is projected across the space and intercepted by a large truncated prism, a scaled and stylized manifestation of the future shaft. The polished granite surface of the prism's upper face interrupts and displaces a section of the projected image of street activity on one winter's day and re-casts it elsewhere in the gallery space. Mounted on the walls, etchings on glass taken from historical maps of the area examine the changes that have taken place over time, from agrarian pastures to Victorian overcrowding and multiple successive immigrant populations. Soon some surface buildings under compulsory purchase order will vanish from here along with a core of untold stories of the East End. Hanbury Terrain serves as a kind of premonition of things to come not without a sense of trepidation and curiosity.

Jane Mulfinger is working on a mapping project with local children at Buxton Junior School.

Graham Budgett and Jane Mulfinger are faculty members of the University of California, Santa Barbara. They currently live in Cambridge and are affiliated as researchers with the University of Westminster in London and Microsoft Research Cambridge. They have exhibited widely in the public arena and commercial galleries including: Camden Arts Centre; St. Pancras Station; The British Library; The Victoria & Albert Museum; The Photographers' Gallery; & the Mayor Gallery, London; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Projects UK, Newcastle; Franklin Furnace Archive, New York; Orchard Gallery, Derry; Leefahsahlung Gallery, Chinatown, Los Angeles; and Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts. Most recently, "Regrets, Cambridge" was launched in November, 2005. The project culminated in large-scale projections in the town square. More information is available at regrets.org.uk.