URBAN ALCHEMY BOOK
Urban Alchemy is an ongoing investigation into the sites and materials of demolition and the people who undertake it. It has involved residencies on active demolition sites in East London with McGees, John Hunt and Maylarch and led to a residency with East London Printmakers and a Leverhulme Trust artist/alchemist residency with UCL (University College London) Chemistry working with UCL Estates department, The Institute of Making and the demolition contractors on the UCL site.
It involves physical, artistic, collaborative experiments to create a specific ‘urban palette’ from large scale chemical etchings into roofing zinc to road rollered hoarding woodcuts and stone lithography trials on unlikely stone/concrete. The work has led to ongoing collaborations across science, print, breaking and making and is developing constantly.
The book ‘Urban Alchemy’ contains poetics narratives of the life cycles of materials from copper to asbestos tracing their global stories as they are salvaged from a conventional flows of waste and reuse. It is in the collections of the National Poetry Library and many more artist book and poetry collections.
