The Transient City, D-Contemporary 19th April – 11th May 2018

London, as with most cities is in a constant state of change, buildings seem permanent and immovable but all will eventually go. Many are lost to catastrophic events; the Great Fire, the Blitz, usually it is a gradual war of attrition, of boom and bust, fashion or just neglect. It is often only the underlying structure that remains, the mediaeval street patterns, the sewerage system, the infrastructure on which a city survives which acts as a palimpsest of its former incarnation.

It is this transience that Luke M Walker examined in this exhibition, from a lofty position on some of the city’s highest landmarks, from Vauxhall, to St Pauls to The Sky Gardens, Walker paints the fluid nature of the city as is morphs its way along the Thames like the turning of the tides.

The sites are linked through a series of walks, entitled ‘Datascapes’, in which he mapped his progress through the city; pace, speed, number of steps etc. using an iphone app. These are painted and become physical representations of the momentary act of walking itself.

Transience expressed from the singular perspective of one of its current citizens and in the complex  physical  structures of the city itself.