Project title: Archive for a Fragile Island
Location: The Round Tower, Broad St, Old Portsmouth, UK
Date: 30th July – 3rd August, 2025
Artist Statement:
I am an artist working with walking, mapping, drawing, sculpture, film and sound. My work aims to explore the ambiguity associated with any attempt to map or categorise landscape. The idea that “the map is not the territory” points toward an inherent gap in our knowing; an unachievable rationalisation of our surroundings and our place within it. By referencing the visual language of the map, the book and the archive, I aim to unpick the often implied objectivity of these modes of presentation in order to engage with more fluid and reflexive expressions of our place in the world.
Contextual Statement:
For my final major project I wanted to question the implied objective truth of the map and the archive as records of place, using Portsmouth, my home, as an example. The city fully covers Portsea Island, whose coastline has considerably altered over time due to human and non-human factors. Similarly, Portsmouth’s role as a centre of naval power has fluctuated, mirroring the decline and loss of an empire and the certainty it once provided. Given this physical and symbolic flux, it seemed appropriate to adopt methodologies that subvert the certainty and finitude of archival practice, offering a more fluid and ambiguous perspective.
On visiting locations along Portsea Island’s coastline (nominally at the four points of the compass), in addition to traditional methods like collecting objects, photography and drawing, I also adopted two processes to access less predictable outcomes. The first was asemic writing – mark-making that appears as writing but without specific meaning. As I sensed the place, I made marks that recorded the experience, but which could not be reinterpreted later in any conventional sense.
Secondly, the 3D scanning app Kiri Engine created misleadingly accurate representations of objects and geographical features. The resulting glitches – some areas detailed, others generalised or omitted – offered new, unreliable interpretations that nonetheless had the appearance of technological accuracy.
These inconsistencies and absences align with Derrida’s Archive Fever, which discusses how archived memory inevitably “forces out other memories” (Derrida and Prenowitz 1995). They also resonate with Stuart Hall’s reference to “a fantasy of completeness” in Constituting an Archive (Hall 2001) and Mark Fisher’s definition of the eerie (Fisher 2016). The locations themselves had an essential eeriness, partly due to the presence of infrastructure whose purpose is now absent. My consideration of objectivity was informed by Donna Haraway’s Situated Knowledges (Haraway 1988) and her critique of the “modest witness” (Haraway 1997), which led me to reflect on my own role within the archive. This, alongside Tim Ingold’s ideas on research as an art practice (Ingold 2020), was significant, as I freed myself from trying to create a “true” sense of place.
Outcomes centred on four map-like artist books. These digitally combined layered historical maps, wireframe renders from 3D scans, sketches, and asemic writing, in order to create seemingly functional objects that were impractical to use. Accompanying these were proforma found object record sheets, including blanks to signify an incomplete collection. All were housed in custom Solander archive boxes, which themselves reference the building of empire through knowledge, their design accredited to Daniel Solander, an eighteenth-century archivist at the British Museum.
An animation produced from 3D scans of the map books, featuring layered sounds from each location, allowed technology to create new virtual landscapes defined by further inaccuracies and omissions.
The books were first displayed at the University of Portsmouth Library before joining the full multimedia installation at the Round Tower, part of Portsmouth’s historic harbour fortifications.
I collaborated with artist Amber Ward, who constructed two of the four Solander boxes. David Sherren, the map librarian at Portsmouth University, provided high-definition scans of historic Portsea Island maps, and Jane Polwin, Procurement and Metadata Librarian, created simulated catalogue entries for the map books.
The project was also supported by Hotwalls Studios in Portsmouth, and Anglepoise.
The four archive boxes:
Unpacking the North archive box:
Animation produced from 3D scans of the map books (includes sound):
Animation of 3D scans of geographical features found at each location:
The installation at the Round Tower:
Walking from the roof of the Round Tower into and around the installation:
Exploring the North archive table:
Exploring the South archive table: