200.00 GBP
London Rocks: Vauxhall
tracing-layered photo printed on digital transfer film in antique drawer
30 x 24.5 x 5.5 cm
River Thames rock photographed near Vauxhall Bridge at low tide. The photograph was then printed and minutely traced with archival ink over a lightbox, inserting handwritten texts related to the location. Tracing and photograph were then combined to produced another print on digital transfer film. Placed under an acrylic sheet in an antique drawer, this work becomes a textual artefact - a preserved interpretation of the fluid archive which is the River Thames.
Texts on the rock from:
London Encyclopaedia, 1983:
Samuel Pepys Diary where reference to Vauxhall:
"It is very cheap to go thither for a man go to spend what he will or nothing, all is one - but to hear the nightingales and other birds, and here fiddles and there a harp, and here a jews trump, and here laughing, and there fine people walking, is mighty divertising."
and
contemporary ballad about Vauxhall:
"Now the summer months come round / Fun and pleasure will abound / High and low and great and small / Run in droves to view Vauxhall / See the motley crew advance / Led by Folly in the dance / English, Irish, Spanish, Gaul / Drive like mad to dear Vauxhall...."
The work is ready to hang.
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The work of artist and historian Lito Apostolakou hosted in Inklinks discusses narratives of time, words, memory and history. Lito uses antique papers, archival ink, vintage prints and worn stationery to create collages on found objects like stones, drawers, wooden boards and and industrial trays. Her work has been exhibited in London, Bristol and Bath.
LONDON ROCKS - 20 Bridges is a project that explores the river Thames as a fluid archive of rocks, fragments and stories and as a historical and literary narrative. Collecting and photographing river rocks under the bridges of the tidal river, Lito Apostolakou then uses them to create what she calls textual artefacts - tracings of the rocks' form and texture, interlaced with texts linked to each bridge location. The first London Rocks installation, a series of 20 boxes with tracing-layered prints and sound recordings was shown at the Creative Histories conference, organised by the Bristol Institute for Research in the Humanities and Arts, Bristol 19-21 July 2017.
www.litoapostolakou.com