An interview with Julian Walker by Richard Edwards
The artist approached this commission with a question, which is how do we understand, how do we give ourselves tools to understand, the nature of the identity of this place. It is very much picking up on the concept of place, what does place mean, when you apply it to this spot which has got such a history of change; and there were things that from his experience, which is a clear lack of experience of this place. If you don’t come from Greenwich then it is not a place you would go to. He could remember once a couple of years ago taking his children to the National Maritime Museum and getting off at North Greenwich by mistake, and it was like the place you came to by mistake. His only other experience was coming through the Blackwall tunnel.
If you look at the shape of the river, it is a bit liking saying this place is like the underarm of London, the place that doesn’t really go anywhere really. It is almost like a hidden place, and that is quite crucial to what has happened here over the years, which is that it is a place to try out stuff. It was once marshes, and a place where they could put the magazine store so the ships that came down river from Deptford and Rotherhithe could pick up their gunpowder here, because it didn’t matter if the place got blown up. People eventually complained about the gunpowder store and had it moved. Since then there has been heavy industry, the gas works, the sulphuric acid works, and the munitions works. It has been a place where these rather unpleasant things have happened. It was quite a surprise to do the research and find out that sort of thing happened within London and that it was really so close to the centre of London. So there is a ground of change that goes on and on, and of things being slightly shifted away to an area that in a way didn’t matter so much.
So these are the two concepts that Julian worked with, the idea of change and how you understand change, how do you look at now within that framework, and how do deal with the products of these rather unpleasant activities that are going on. That gave him the sense of justification to work with rubbish, this reject stuff if you like, stuff picked up off the ground, and to say if change is the identity of this place how to work with that idea. How to convey the idea that now is just a point in a continuum of change. If you look at the development of things in the past and how things become obsolete in different ways, and there being gaps or distances between two points in the past - if you project this into the future then you can say things will change in the future, so there are indications of how things may change in the future. The main point he wanted to convey was the idea that for all of these pasts, all of these points in the past, there was a time when they were now, and so that now will go on being part of that process of change.
Some of the stories are sad stories. It is the nature of human life that what is recorded most is death. What we document most is when people die – we may not know when they are born but we will know to the hour when they died because of what they do during their life. You are continually going through stories of things disappearing, people dying, people being killed, and a lot of the records are of plague death, death in war, records of crimes, and so on. There are some incredibly sad stories. There are certain conventions that Julian follows. One is when he wants an object to work with someone who has been killed in an air raid he uses a piece of molten glass. Another is when someone has been recorded as an anonymous death he uses a feather. There is a record of someone buried in Greenwich in the 17th century and what is recorded is that he was a strange boy, which means he was a boy who came from outside the parish, and died, and the parish had the responsibility of burying him. That is the only thing that is left – it is really like a feather in that they can just be blown away. So the nature of making this work meant that he had to engage with all these stories and there are something like 1800 of the cards, and of those half of them are individual stories about people. It would sound a bit of a cliché to say you get to know these people, but you invent things, you invent your reaction to them and it is still a valid reaction to them because you are inventing it from the data you have available, and the experience you bring to that story. On the other hand it is perfectly valid for other people to come and say - actually this work is about this and not about that. When you put your work into the public space and the public domain you are entirely leaving it open for people to bring their own stories to it and for them to say what they think it is about. In the sense, the work is visually an aggressively low-tech piece of work in a high - tech environment.
One of the things that is key to this idea is ‘how does space become place?’ It is to do with events – space plus event makes place. That is what the geographer Doreen Massey has written about – how this continues your concept of what the place is – it is continually being negotiated as different people come through and different activities. And as the land itself changes. Where we were standing 500 years ago would have been the banks of the Thames and if you had looked south all you would have seen would be marshland. Now it is fit enough to build these enormous things. The extraordinary thing about this land is that people have pulled it up, dug into it, built on top of it, filled up the holes, pulled down the buildings, more or less continuously for 500 years.