A continuous line of dashes and hyphens 2006

•

A continuous line of dashes and hyphens 2006
Installation by Alex Dipple

Photograph by Lucian Taylor

A single line running unbroken around the gallery, hyphens and dashes cut from thousands of daily and weekend newspapers and pasted directly on the walls. A small enclosed space dissected by one thin line, one horizon orbiting the viewer. Each individual hyphen as specific as the text from which it was lifted; the liminal space below and above the hyphen forming a tower rising from the line and its reflection descending below. The viewer enters, filling the absent centre of this extended newsprint landscape, and is encompassed by a miniature rendition of some imagined skyline in a collage of punctuation.

Written by Tom Trevatt

Photograph by Lucian Taylor

The 17th century maps of London by Wenceslaus Hollar fascinate me. The first, a panorama, takes the river as it’s central character. Hollar worked with a magnifying glass and drew in impossible detail.
His second etching depicts a London devoid of people; Peter Ackroyd describes it as,’ a great empty space waiting silently for its destruction in the Fire.’

Photograph by Lucian Taylor

There is something small andchildlike about the city, a fragility made more intense by the blank walls ofthe gallery that surround it. The observer is drawn in by the detail, a senseof looking through a microscope, yet the closer it is viewed the moreoverwhelming it becomes and the city becomes unfathomable and complex.

The city has an inner space, specific to each one of us. In the words ofIain Sinclair, The Guardian 14.07.05, ‘we see through our pores’, we experiencethe city as if it is part of our own bodies.