HTAP at Hackney Wicked, 1st August 2009

As part of my association with HTAP I was part of Pattern Making For Beginners held on Saturday 1 August at the Red House, behind the Counter Cafe. The event was described as a research and collection day that was primarily executed via a diverse range of mapping type tools. My contributions were a Type Cast Map and a Secrets Map.

The Type Cast Map follows on from my earlier work regarding place image and the Hackney Gazette headlines. Here I invited people to describe Hackney in general, or a particular part of it, in their own words. I then printed these words onto a map of Hackney using woodblock type and a basic ink pad, thus creating a landscape of text. People's responses ranged from the personal to the political, but the majority of the responses, unlike those of the Hackney Gazette, were of a positive nature. The three photographs below show the map in action at the festival.





The Secrets Map was an installation comprising a framed map behind a black curtain and a shelf with cards, envelopes and a wooden box. Participants were invited to share a secret that related to somewhere in Hackney, fill this in on a card, seal the card in an envelope and place it in the box. They were then asked to locate the secret by placing a red cross on the map of Hackney behind the curtain. The only elements included on the map were icons for Mosques, Churches and Synagogues—these, and the black curtain, hint at something of a confessional type experience. The three photos below show the map in action and a close up of its use.





I intend to develop this project further, by locating the site of the secret, gathering visual and other types of evidence, and speculating on the nature of the confession.