What Must We Dream Of?

The project

This online exhibition takes us on a journey through Neepsend and Parkwood Springs. Scarred by industrialisation, deindustrialisation, slum clearance and war, these inner city areas are being reinvented in surprising ways. The project began when artists Patrick Murphy and Anton Want embarked on a series of city walks with Dr Amanda Crawley Jackson (School of Languages and Cultures), whose research explores post-traumatic landscapes in literature and the visual arts. What they saw has inspired them to create a unique document. This collection of photographs and mixed media pieces immerses us in a place where little utopias of creativity, resilience and hope jostle with big municipal and commercial developments.

The gallery

Anton Want’s photographs and literary responses, displayed here as a series of diptychs, offer a contemplative approach to city landscapes, chance encounters, nature and memory. The work offers viewers an interpretation of everyday post-traumatic landscapes through the prism of Amanda’s research, and the artists‘ engagement with local communities to gain a deeper understanding of an area rich in its layers of life.

Patrick Murphy’s mixed-media assemblages visually explore the landscape and topography through a series of site recordings based on Amanda’s research. These are used as a basis to abstract the essence of place, highlighting marks that have been made during 200 years of planned industrialisation and sporadic ad hoc contemporary development.