Home Sweet Home: 1970-2018 The British Home, A Political History

The photographic work 'Delisted' (2012) was included in ‘Home Sweet Home: 1970-2018 The British Home, A Political History’, a group exhibition curated by Isabelle Bonnet and exhibited at Maison des Peintres, Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles, France and at the Institute for photography, Lille 2019.

‘Delisted’ depicts the search for architectural elements in London that had been delisted from the English Heritage – renounced of their significant status – over the last decade. In the archives of English Heritage, a document recording the act of delisting is kept as recognition of the past significance and as evidence of the erasure (or deliberate ‘forgetting’) process itself. The list contained addresses of what has been or is in the process of being historically and culturally forgotten, discarded and erased. This also entails the shifting of property from the public to the private domain, allowing people to renovate or alter the fabric of the building once it is no longer of recognised cultural value.

Following that list, the artist devised paths that took her from one location to the next, each time marking certain areas in the city where delisting took place. In some cases, the list offered a short description of the delisted element, for example: a post stand, a water fountain, or a fish and chip shop. However, in most cases only an address survived in the archive, which invited the work of the imagination to stand for the missing gaps. The photographs of the Delisted series depict the artist's search for the erased architecture, a search resembling a ghost hunt, searching for what is in the process of being erased or is no longer there. The images attest to the search itself, the expectations and at times false assumptions of what is deemed culturally significant in the absence of further information. The exploration of the erasure process emphasises the political and social changes and how they manifest in both the urban landscape and the cultural heritage.