The Fields Beneath

About

We are three artists with a history of living, working and art making in the forgotten corners, architectural oubliettes and urban interstices of this most multi layered, trans temporal metropolis of them all… London! 

We were attracted by St Augustine's Tower as a unique exponent of these qualities of a living urban history.

We share a sense of ‘psycho geography’ - the exploration of urban environments that emphasises playfulness and drifting. The term “psycho geography” was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.” It has also variously been defined as “a total dissolution of boundaries between art and life”, also “a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities... just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape”. These strategies for survival in an ever evolving urban environment are, I think, to be found in different ways in our individual approaches to making art.

Psychogeography is perhaps most immediately identifiable in Pete's street photography, using an ancient Nokia camera phone to capture and re-contextualise glimpses of the hoardings and temporary structures of urban regeneration/gentrification. However if you retrace the steps taken by Rocco to retrieve the fragments and echoes of industrial processes he uses in his day to day work life, you can glimpse the same restless energy for dissolving the boundaries between art and work, and for an almost pastoral joy in the materiality of things. 

For myself I suggest that my art comes from a need to create narrative structures that incorporate or contextualise the disparate forms of my body and the world into matrix within which I can live.

 I suggest that this romantic relationship with the material world feels more urgent than ever before with the arrival of the new communities and structures of social media, globalisation and the online worlds adding to the overcrowding of human experience.

Each of us three urban “flaneurs” has brought to this special building the results of his own enquiry and response to the post-industrial environment. Exploring a mishmash of themes ranging from the fetishisation and alienating effects of work and the workplace, the materiality of the body, and the location of the humane within the industrial .

We invite newcomers to discover St Augustine’s tower for themselves, it is a historical gem, hiding in plain sight (site?), in the midst of the Hackney you thought you knew…

Hope you can make it.

Adam Zoltowski.

5th feb 2019.