'Signs of Post-War Housing': an illustrated lecture

About

Writer and lecturer Sam Gathercole will deliver an illustrated lecture on ‘Signs of Post-War Housing', focusing on the signage found in and around post-war housing estates in London. These largely feature maps of the estates and function as a means of orientating the visitor, while also imposing a set of ideas on both these architectural environments. Questions of representation emerge through the verbal and visual language of the signs, the desires that they both reflect and encourage, and the nature of the space that they map. This event has been programmed in response to Spike Island's upcoming exhibition, Maelfa by artist Sean Edwards. In Maelfa, a mixed media installation, Edwards has made a direct study of a 1970s municipal shopping centre on the outskirts of Cardiff, focusing on its disappearing communities and failed utopian aspirations as well as his own autobiographical relationship to this apparently marginal site. Sam Gathercole is Programme Leader for Cultural and Contextual Studies in the Department of Art, Design and Media at Croydon Higher Education College. Recent writing includes exhibition catalogue texts on Bruce McLean and Michael Brick. Other projects include the book and exhibition concrete thoughts: modern architecture and contemporary,at Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester in 2006, and the essays ‘Art and construction in Britain in the 1950s', in Art History, and ‘Construction and the human gesture of organisation', in Kenneth Martin & Mary Martin: Constructed Works.