Skins of This Site
(OVADA, Oxford, 2023)
In a project commissioned by OVADA Gallery, Oxford (UK) I collaborated with artist Harriet Crisp to produce a site-specific project on the history of the OVADA warehouse. Skins of This Site is a cartographic print and a binaural soundscape. Understanding the site as a conjunction of physical, metaphysical, and socio-political phenomena, we researched its history and spent time in the space, recording sound, taking photos, creating floor rubbings, and writing. Taking a particular interest in the warehouse’s use as a Hide and Skin market in the early 20th century, we began to think about the historic use of skin or vellum as a writing surface, and subsequently the metaphor of the palimpsest: a manuscript where writing has been rubbed away and the surface repurposed; something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form. This became a useful starting point in representing layered histories. The soundscape amplifies the visitor’s immediate experience of the space and incorporates sounds which excavate the site’s history as an Abbey, a graveyard and an industrial space. Visual traces of the site inform the accompanying paper ‘hides’. Maps, photos, building plans, floor rubbings, and screen grabs of online sources are combined with sculptures made from old Oxford telephone directories.
