Paul Landon

PAUL LANDON

gaps . grids . ghosts

Projects

ghosts

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Gaps, grids and ghosts is an exploration of urban landscape, an investigation initiated by walking through built environments, documenting these and taking notes. The exploration involves a kind of “wayfinding,” a methodology of negotiating rather than navigating the territory encountered. Buildings, arteries, vistas, objects in the landscape are identified to serve as reference points to remember and to locate oneself ; a sort of mental GPS is activated. The urban fabric metamorphoses; forces of speculation and public policy, defence, economic, and social projects lead to ruptures and incongruities, and to an unexpected fluidity, in the built landscape. These changes are often experienced as sensations of hope, loss and regret; the city becomes a canvas for endless renewal and persistent forgetting. This exploration manifests itself as reflections on recurrent features in the experience of the city: reflections on the spaces between the houses, businesses and places of recreation, the gaps: the sites of construction, demolition and dereliction that perforate the urban fabric;reflections on the built landscape registered as a diagram, a map; the grid renders the city abstract yet measurable, quantifiable and submissive. The repetitive form evokes the judicial structuring of land ownership and regulation. The invisible boundaries and jurisdictions are rendered as a pattern of lines and forms. Different street layouts have different characteristics reflecting different terrains, histories and uses.reflections on the spectral movements and forces in the city, the remnants and resonances of dreams and realisations taking form in physical structures, social organisations and collective projects. As these pass into history, become myths and are forgotten they resonate like ghosts haunting the urban ambience.These reflections have led to different bodies of work, in various stages of completion, bodies that include elements of drawing, photography, video, writing and combinations of these.