Constructed all through the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, the Aylesbury Property is a gigantic public housing advanced in South East London that at its peak, boasted 11,000 residents. Like different social tasks of this sort, Aylesbury has struggled with violence and vandalism all through its run, and in 2005, native officers determined to demolish the property and rebuild in phases somewhat than rehabilitate the present constructions.
Dwelling and dealing in South East London for practically 4 many years, Harriet Mena Hill was acquainted with the realm, but it surely wasn’t till 2018 when she was commissioned to show a summer time program for younger residents that she actually engaged with the undertaking. She made massive portraits from wool, mixing dyed roving to delineate home windows, form bowed electrical wires, and even mimic graffiti spray-painted on out of doors partitions.
Forming the collection Mushy Concrete, the textile items solid a largely grey setting of stone and metal in mushy fiber. The physique of labor, Hill says, was a “repositioning of how the property is perceived. Traditionally, it has been broadly portrayed within the media as violent and intimidating, as a spot with out hope.”
In distinction, Mushy Concrete “presents the property as a spot of dwelling and neighborhood. From a distance, the portraits seem like pictures or real looking work, however on nearer inspection, the fabric reveals itself to be wool, hand blended for refined color mixing used to depict small lively particulars of home life,” the artist provides.
Hill is broadly within the ways in which communities and the objects they work together with can change into vessels for shared reminiscences, so when the property started to be razed in 2020, she began to gather fragments of concrete from the development web site. “It was a direct response to the scenario of residents who have been required to remain at house because the demolition of adjoining blocks, the properties of their former neighbours, continued all through lockdown, despite wider restrictions,” she tells Colossal.
Earlier than its destruction, a number of tenants had advocated for renovations somewhat than demolition, hoping to protect the neighborhood and houses they’d constructed. In an interview with the BBC in 2023, long-time resident Aysen Dennis lamented being compelled to depart the property after 30 years. Native directors discovered her new housing in central London, but it surely wasn’t the identical. “The council gave me every little thing I requested for. It’s on a excessive flooring. There’s plenty of mild. I can see the park,” Dennis stated. “Nevertheless it’s not my house.”
Intimate in scale, Hill’s work glimpse hallways and pockets of home windows which can be equally sliced from their bigger contexts, the ragged edges of concrete framing the largely home areas. A part of the continued collection titled The Aylesbury Fragments, the scenes seize the run-down infrastructure of buildings left standing through the phased reconstruction course of.
Though regeneration started in 2013, it’s lower than half full, and Hill has accomplished greater than 150 work so far. As demolition continues, she provides to her ever-changing assortment of concrete remnants. “I dwell with the unpainted items for months, generally years, attending to know their form earlier than I start engaged on them,” the artist says, noting that so long as there are buildings nonetheless beneath building, she’ll proceed portray these small tributes to the neighborhood as soon as housed inside their partitions.
Hill has exhibitions slated for London and throughout the U.Okay. all through 2027. Comply with alongside on Instagram.
