KA WOW1

Here it is, warlord of the week #1, A drawing in the style of Pete McMahon.

The three sets of lines represent the networks around the three parts of my brief.  Light green is the workshop network – timber ingoing, products outgoing and knowledge interchange between timber/woodworking groups and companies.  The grey lines link networks surrounding the world of the undertaker.  This links local meeting places (possible funeral venues), hospitals, nursing homes and graveyards.  The local housing existing and proposed is also shown, showing where users of of all three functions will be travelling from.  Darker green lines show links between existing health facilities, both primary and secondary care.

ka-wow1.pdf

the final cast

Declaring Interdependence

Interdependence is everyday life; the small stuff as well as the big stuff.  It is being reliant on people, systems and provisions, and in turn being relied upon.  

Interdependence is giving blood to prolong the lives of strangers.  

Interdependence is remembering to live by acknowledging death.  

Undertaking is interdependence.

Plaster of paris anyone?

The plaster casting continues.

Many thanks to Mel and Sarah for their help!

early thoughts

 Back to the model now.

Drawing the brief

 

The brief begins to take shape…  Things are made in a workshop - tables, chairs, sculptures, smaller things, bigger things, and also coffins.  The workshop is connected to an undertakers (or perhaps the joiners/carpenters are the undertakers). 

Part of the project then is about how our society deals with death; about mourning, remembering and going on living.  Part is about health and refuge, about care for the excluded.  Part is about making, healing through making and making a living.

“to undertake is to bind oneself to the performance of a task, to pledge or promise to get it done.”

from Lynch, Thomas, ‘The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade’ (London: Vintage, 1998) ppxx

Casting Spital Hill

 The extrodinarily heavy site model (this section has used approximately 20kg of plaster of paris)  is beginning to take shape.  The slice through the lower part of the model is the path of ‘Fiery Jack’s Tunnel’ which runs from the site of the former Wicker station to the former Bridgehouses station.  The section photographed is one of three slices through the site; the others are under construction.

Life, Death, and Provisional Construction

Provisional: existing for the present

but open to the future

and aware of the past 

Provisional construction can be designing with an awareness of temporality and the possibility of change in use, appearance and strategy.  A design for a construction is not something that becomes fixed in time.  Like a map is like a snapshot, in reality an ‘as built’ drawing as actually a provisional drawing.  When does construction actually finish?  At hand-over?  Ten years down the line?  After a building is extended? Partially demolished?  Completely demolished?  In that sense, all construction is provisional. 

Provisional construction can also be a framework or a pattern that allows for change daily, monthly or yearly. 

Provisional construction is exploration and experimentation and a way of testing uses of a site. 

The human body can be seen as a provisional construction.  The body is a temporal thing; it exists now but is not infallible. 

Likewise a tree is a provisional construction.  It germinates, grows and matures.  It lives for a time through the changing seasons, sheltering, supporting, binding the earth.  Bough by bough or in one blow, the tree is felled.  It becomes other things; a book, a cricket bat, fuel, a table, or a coffin.

a longwinded statement of provisional construction

Thinking about life, death, health and provisional construction I started drawing a timeline of healthcare in Spital Hill, Sheffield, England and the World.  I think this is going to be something that I continue as I go along -  a bit of a provisional construction perhaps. 

Madness and Civilization

From Foucault’s Madness and Civilization:

“At the end of the the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western World.  In the margins of the community, at the gates of the cities there stretched wastelands where sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable.”

“Leprosy disappeared, the leper vanished, or almost, from memory; these structures remained.  Often, in these same places, the formulas of exclusion would be repeated, strangely familiar two or three centuries later.  Poor vagabonds, criminals, and ‘deranged minds’ would take the part played by the leper, and we shall see what salvation was expected from this exclusion, for them and for those who excluded them.”

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Routledge, 2001) Translated by Richard Howard