When the lockdown started, I just kept walking…looking for the route of the two thousand year old London Wall, all 7.3 kilometres of it. I walked along it, then I walked across the City and crossed the Thames bridges. The City was silent. Even St Paul’s Cathedral had closed down and given up the ghost.
Obscured through centuries of neglect, buried beneath the Old Bailey, lovingly restored next to a new office block; the wall keeps itself hidden. Like the Berlin Wall, it haunts the city that it was originally designed to protect and challenges those confined by the city limits. This project responds to a question from course leader Rolina Blok: ‘Does it lock us in or does it liberate us?’ And to a suggestion from tutor David Holah: ‘Build the wall.’ In response, the walk along the wall has been tracked using a running app, photographed night and day and then carefully rebuilt.
Set in the heart of the Square Mile, Guildhall, the headquarters of the City of London Corporation disappears under the waves in a sun-baked landscape, at the very heart of financing both UK industry and with it the climate emergency.
Iron in the Soul was the perfect lock down project. Spare paper and poster paint from a cancelled workshop, a steam iron and the insides of a moulie combined to investigate the agony and the ecstasy of lock down life.
My blog walkingcity charts progress on the City Lit Advanced Printmaking and Media course over the past term and my portfolio site paullincoln.work is an archive of previous work.
Advanced Printmaking + Digital Media: end of year show 