I was invited by the University of the Arts London alumni association to go to my old college, Central St Martin’s, yesterday to make drawings for a project they’re doing called ‘Mapping the Move’. The college will be moving to brand new premises next year, and people have realised that there will be a massive loss involved, namely of the Southampton Row building, which in many ways is quite the loveliest building I know.
So, along with about eight other people I turned up yesterday morning with some drawing things. After a very brief introduction, we were left to go our separate ways within the building. My first visit since I left, I think. What an experience… I expected to find it interesting, not to be completely overwhelmed, as I was, with great raw gushes of emotion! I don’t even know what it was all about; I think I’ll be musing on this and trying to unpick it all for quite a while.
My time at Central was really mixed. I chose to go there initially because I loved the building, and I wanted to be in the very middle of London. And there was an awareness that my grandfather (who died before I was born) had taught lithography there for a time, so I suppose I felt some kind of sense of familial connection, however tenuous. Oh, and I’d seen one of the tutors on a TV programme about artists, which had impressed me greatly (and in fact he turned out to be probably the only tutor there that I think I ever really got any useful teaching from).
I found myself focusing on small details: stained and cracked corners of beautifully-laid floors, original glass which had gently shifted shape over the decades causing the view of the Sicilian Avenue opposite to meld and shimmer, gracefully curling handles of window fastenings that over the years that had stood many sessions of painting and repainting, the cone-shaped metal pitcher in the etching room covered with layers of dripped straw-hat varnish. And the big, grand statements of architectural splendour: the stone window seats, the vaulted stone ceilings, the elegant windows, the stunning stairwells. I watched students amble around the corridors chatting, just as I had, and mucking about in the computer room. They stood around on landings speaking into their mobile phones and gave every impression of taking the place for granted, just as we had. I think I had felt the building to be a kind of supporting mother, absorbing its children’s expectations and hopes, and it spilled some of them back to me yesterday.
The archive wants to keep all the drawings made. I don’t think much of my little sketches, but I may well work into or from them in some way. As well as drawing, I took a lot of photos on my phone. Why on earth didn’t I take a proper camera – I don’t seem to have a sensible way of getting photos off the phone at the moment, or I’d show you some. I think that sometimes (no, often) a photograph can be a lot better than a drawing, though there’s a lot to be said for going through the process of making a drawing, it really is a unique way of looking and reflecting on what you’re seeing. At one point I became transfixed by a bundle of orange wires streaming through a clumsily knocked soot-black hole on their journey between one room and another, high up in the corner of a hallway. It evoked all sorts of thoughts about the nature of things hidden and exposed, and about changing situations. The wires led to the computer room, which had been the 2nd year painting studio when I was there.
I felt absolutely drained afterwards.
