Where a test borehole is to be drilled. Arena fields. Feb 2008
A cherry tree flowers on Hackney East Marsh outside the soil storage site branded in ODA Cerulean Blue. May 2010
The processes by which the Olympic landscape is transformed by its new developers includes branding. Their signs assert presences that spectators of these interventions must take on board. The 12 foot high blank blue hoarding erected around the construction site by the Olympic Delivery Authority established a vast mono-tonal exclusion of local curiosity about what they were doing within this appropriated space. Any graffitoed responses, they announced to the press, would be erased by a painting-out crew who would patrol the circumference of their employer’s blank installation every morning. Keen connoisseurs of counter-branding soon learnt that this blanking crew did not work over the weekend. Therefore the weekend was the best time to record the wit of weekend taggers.
I much preferred the pre-branded version (below). It materialised the constructor’s true indifference to both local landscape and corporate branding simultaneously.
Soil dump on East Marsh, Hackney, under construction. 2009
Subcontractors add their brand logos to an office block being built for the Westfield development at ‘Stratford City’. Nov 2010
Reconstruction as a branded performance in a branded landscape. Last minute re-paving of bus stops at Leyton Underground station. July 2012
£4m was spent on a tree simulator to glamorise gaps in the old Stratford landscape. March 2012
During Games time images of nominated athletic ‘heroes’ were blazoned at super scale across a variety of buildings situated conveniently for Stratford visitors to view.
The first half of the face of a swimmer in the Paralympics is pasted at the shopping mall. Aug 2012
Stretched across a block of flats in the Carpenters estate in Stratford. At that time the empty block was marked for demolition to make way for the planned redevelopment of a campus for University College. This has since been challenged by an activist campaign. July 2012
An anonymised sprinter adds value to some cars. Artwork covers the dominating brutalism of the empty office block Morgan House in Stratford. Aug 2012
In case you did not know where you were place names were inserted at chosen road junctions.
Ruckholt Road railway bridge. Jan 2013
Bow roundabout. Feb 2013
Fragments of the securitised landscape lingered after the event.
Leaving a landscape of hostile anonymity. Unused post-Olympic people processing pens Leyton. Dec 2012
Leaving a fragment of a brutalised dreamtime. Security fencing Leyton June 2013
Happiness is apparently being hot and scantily clothed on a beach somewhere else.
Stratfield
