Rupert Griffiths: BORDERLANDS

About

'Borderlands' looks at the tensions at play between the over-determined and legible places in the city and those places that are under-determined and under the radar. Offering an interpretation of the cities derelict and hidden landscapes; the work draws particularly from those fragmented spaces found around roads, rail, river and canal systems, and the physical infrastructures of our post industrial cities.
The work uses materials, processes and techniques that are typically used to re-brand failed spaces undergoing redevelopment - the architectural models, computer renderings, slick surfaces, diagrams, photographs and tidy trees that are often employed to present an image of a cleaner, brighter, and fictional future. Here though, the work makes use of visual language in order to evoke the richness of dereliction.
The methods by which the work was produced - rapid prototyping technologies such as 3d printing, laser cutting, laser etching and glass panels - do not match the places they represent. This technological material language is hijacked in order to describe archetypal space, uncertain but known - an entrance, a bridge, an occluded alleyway. The cleaness of the objects and images belies the mental space they refer to, perhaps dark. 3D printed models of places on the edge - ruins, a dark underpass, a hole in the ground. This technology is often used to create architectural models, to communicate and describe, to lend legitimacy to plans, concepts and ideas. Here they are used to create models of failure, decay or uncertainty.