- Venue
- Outpost
- Location
- East England
On the way to see Lucy Harrison’s show at Outpost I lost a glove. It was a new one but I had already become attached to it. I had arrived a couple of hours early and was wandering around Norwich in the rain. As it turns out Harrison has been doing the same.
Haunts is made up of two tables, one laid out with guidebooks found in Norwich charity shops, the other with books and pamphlets written or edited by Harrison herself. The walls are covered by groups of photographs taken or found over the last ten years. They come from a variety of locations: European cities, Canvey Island and a recent project on the site of the new Olympic village. After a few minutes of circling I found myself in a strange position for a private view; seated at one of the tables, head down, avidly reading about a stroll around Tallinn in search of lost monuments and a ghost who made some pinned up paper flutter in an Oxfam shop.
One collection of photographs caught my eye. They seemed to be of furniture, mostly chairs. I was especially taken by two pictures of empty lecture theatres. There is nothing more pleasurable or pointless than a lecture theatre without people. Empty rooms and empty chairs. These were echoed in other images of derelict sites with piles of broken furniture. There was a moment of sudden pleasure when I recognised one of these places. Angel Cottage, a listed Georgian house had been secretly demolished by its owner in the hope of making a profit out of the redevelopment in Stratford. Harrison had been working with the people who had been served with a compulsory purchase order on the Olympic site and had taken two photos of the cottage’s rubble from an upstairs window of the Railway Tavern pub. My recognition of the image gave me a glimpse of the personal connection available to the people involved in the production of Harrison's work and I remembered my own little story about the Angel Cottage.
After this I found myself drawn in by the derelict and semi-derelict, the found aesthetics of stacking, collapse, and graffitied embellishment. I stayed for over an hour (which is a long time for me).
Some of the photos are pinned, others glued directly to the wall and although none of them fluttered from the handiwork of the charity shop ghost; there is a feeling about the show of melancholy, of lost places or deceased owners.
Or it could have been my lost glove and the rain.
