UAL/Clifford Chance Sculpture Award - Making the collage

The second major piece I had proposed was a rather large collage featuring the Isle of Dogs and the meander in the Thames around it. My idea was to put the humans in the water and take the land back to it's pre-docks state c.1775 when it was animal grazing and marshland.

I really struggled with the imagery for the water. I knew I wanted it to be blue and silver and to reflect the sky-scrapers that now occupy Canary Wharf but I couldn't seem to make something that would work as a collage. It was whilst at West Dean, playing with the wooden type that I realised the metal type could be used to great effect - after all what is more human than written language? I was granted two more days to spend at West Dean by Clifford Chance (HUGE thanks!) and used them to create lots of prints of layered abstract building shapes made out of type.

Once I had these made I had to figure out how to use them. I had some monoprints I wanted to incorporate alongside a tetra-pak crane and building. Having had an interesting time scaling up the Thames from an OS map to fit the 3m space I wanted to almost fill it was time to start collaging. I cut down the larger prints following the shapes I had created on them and then added stitch to make them even more sky scraper-y! The result was the Thames in 4 parts all stitched together, which I then had to stitch into one long piece. My sewing machine hasn't quite forgiven me!

Once the river was in place I turned my attention to the land. I wanted to build a subtle landscape into it with more mud at the bottom and more sky at the top but keeping it abstract at the same time. I realised that my original plan of stitching the whole thing as one piece wasn't feasible. Instead I tore and colleged smaller pieces with stitch so that stitch was very much a part of it and would compliment the river sections. These smaller parts were then stuck to the larger paper with wallpaper paste.

The idea was that this should be a piece that you can look very closely at and keep finding details in but you can also walk past at a distance and enjoy.

These are the prints laid out before being torn and collaged.

These are the torn prints being arranged before being stuck down.

It took several days to tearing and sticking but eventually it was all down. Then it was a case of trimming the edges and preparing it for hanging. The most terrifying thing about this was that I didn't see it vertically until it was hung in Clifford Chance's client reception!

The final pieces were the tower cranes which were inspired by the two columns either side of the large collage. I printed a log end and then tore the paper and stitched it to create the crane pattern on each column. Using wood for this was inspired by the fact that wood was the principal building material for the docks and wharfs but also the earliest human settlers would have cleared the original woodland that likely once covered most of this land. It would have been cleared with the coming of agriculture in neolithic times if not earlier. I wanted to show that humans have been building here and changing this landscape for millennia, the most recognisable sign of a building site in London is a tower crane required to build the monstrously tall sky scrapers that now stand in Canary Wharf.

You can see the full exhibition gallery on the 'Welcome' page.