Speaking Places: How to Work.
Speaking Places: How to Work
With Ella Sutherland
Ramp Gallery, Hamilton
23 April – 15 May 2015
Curated by Kim Paton
Speaking Places: How to Work focuses on the ways language may exist and collide within a specific location. Produced with the curator Kim Paton, it was intended as the first part of a larger temporary public project for Hamilton across 2015, which, following a series of difficulties, did not ultimately proceed.
The project examines how the by-products of the natural and constructed environment might be understood, highlighted, traced, and proposed, and asks how graphic design might offer alternative perspectives—drawing on historical, cultural, and social precedents while claiming its own identity as an autonomous form. The exhibition took three parts.
Walls
The first, Walls, was a room of wall diagrams treating the fountain as a symbol of power, developed from Hamilton’s attempt to rebrand itself as ‘The City of Fountains’ in the 1970s, each wall keyed to a title: Fountain as Power, Identity as Fountain, Fountain as Hope, Power as Identity.
Signs
The second, Signs, took newspaper clippings from the 1970s recording the opening of Hamilton’s Centennial Fountain—the most notable of the ‘Fountain City’ initiative, soon embroiled in claims of plagiarism, after which the city dropped the identity altogether—and warped and re-presented them on flag-like forms.
Flag
The third, Flag, synthesised the marks and colours of the diagrams into a single flag, intended to fly in public at the close of the show as the opening gesture of the year-long project that never followed.
