Methods of investigating

Week one 

After reading the brief, I immediately had the idea to use Wood Green High Road (high street) as my location to investigate. In the two weeks since I moved to London, I had walked down the high street nearly every day and it had made a big impression on me, so it seemed like an interesting place to focus on.

After the initial briefing, every time I walked down the high street, I tried to tune in to my surroundings and take photos of anything that seemed important. After reading the Georges Perec text, “Species of Spaces”, I felt I had a method to approach my investigation with. I set out to imagine I hadn’t seen a street before, and to examine every aspect, taking note of everything around me.

I focused on the stretch of road from Turnpike Lane to Wood Green station and walked up and down each day, using note taking, photographing and drawing as my methods of investigation. One afternoon, I spent an hour in the local Wetherspoons, “Spouters Corner”, which I discovered was an important location historically for the area, where different political groups had organised over the years. One evening, I spent some time in a local Greek bakery, people watching and examining the structure of the street. I had also noticed that along the street, every shop front had a collection of shutter repair stickers in different arrangements. I found these interesting graphically and as a visual image, the walls and windows they were arranged around were different at each shopfront, varying in colour and placement. I also liked the idea of them as a representation of DIY advertising and amateur graphic design, using the street as a sort of large-scale noticeboard.

After my first tutorial, I received feedback from my tutor and the group that suggested I focus on the local Wetherspoons or the sticker collections I’d noticed in between each shop front. Previously my work has often centred around people, communities and locations so I thought it might be more interesting to go down a more graphic route to push myself and explore something different.

Week two

In week two, I set out to analyse the stickers further. I continued with walking the same route up and down Wood Green high street, now capturing all the stickers along the whole stretch. It was interesting to notice the areas where they’d been ripped down, usually more upmarket large franchise shops, whereas independent businesses seemed more covered.

Looking at the list of images in my camera roll, I was really stimulated by seeing all of them small in one place. I think there was something about the sheer number of all the stickers shown small as one large image that I felt struck by. Then, being able to zoom in and examine them and see all the small graphic detail. I then cropped all of the stickers individually, examining what kind of fonts and colours were frequently or rarely used.

I also experimented with overlaying the images of the stickers, grouping by colour and background so they were layered, blending into one another. I think this represented the experience of being on the high street and feeling overwhelmed by the constant visual stimuli of the signage and shop fronts. In addition, I was printing out grids of the sticker images, scanning, cropping and reprocessing them to explore and manipulate how they looked. I like the low-res quality this produces, and I think it echoes the DIY amateur look of the stickers themselves.

During my tutorial at the end of this week, it was discussed that amateur graphic design, as well as the idea of looking at the micro and the macro of all the imagery were some of the themes in this project and that I should try to continue making in a way to investigate this.