The London Stone project began in 2008 using scavenged tidal-weathered London Stock bricks collected from the banks of the Thames exhibited at various gallery exhibitions and in a variety of configurations, Most significantly as a site-specific response in 2010, I gathered and placed the fragments of brick in the same space and configuration as the foundation plan of a Georgian period London townhouse. Using the found brick and reconfiguring the objects on the foreshore in which they could be found, in presentation it enabled them to be brought back into visibility. Instead of being lost in the space of its ultimate destruction, the work attempted to arrest its disappearance, if only briefly, while at the same time revealing the temporal unfolding through tidal processes that would cause its ultimate loss. Conceptually this work illustrates its overlooked nature, hidden in plain sight day after day, and the process of its weathering into ever smaller fragments of itself.

In a Sinclairian sense of disappearance, the bricks were overlooked objects that were remnants from a lost piece of London's built environment. Discarded on the banks of the Thames meant that it was un-sited from its original places, no longer tied to the lived experience of its previous inhabitants it is linked to a displacing and forgetting of the past of London. Nonetheless, the work attempted to show how objects, when considered as 'lost things', might as Michael Rowlands has discussed, act as substitutes for lived memory, to become the subject of recollection establishing the 'metonymic relations between objects and events'.[1]  In re-creation or re-presentation, the brick's materiality and their placing express them as an aide-memoire to past, present and future. As sculptural forms, they acted as the objectification of memory reinforced by the site's natural, temporal dynamics.

[1] Michael Rowlands, “Memory, Sacrifice and Nation” in eds. Carter and Hirschkop, Cultural Memory-A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics, Number 30 (Winter 1996-97): 10.