Commendation iGuzzini Travelling Award
A project for the renaissance of The Photographer’s Gallery in Covent Garden. In an attempt to place architecture in space, as an object and as a place, a gallery circulation network is formed within a glowing light object. Like the backlit depth of a Jeff Wall photograph, it begins to light and shape the dark mass which surrounds it, it has bled out from spaces filled with light, the courtyards of the city, becomes almost a solid, an irregular thing. It dictates within it straight and simple boxes, orthogonal walls which contain the photographs.
The year’s thesis develops from the notion of the Lucid Room, playing on the title of Barthes’ speculation on photography. This project understands lucidity through the intertwining of the physicality of light with the poetic potential of language. Narratives give scale to, and inhabit, evocative and abstracted images of space and form, lending them clarity and establishing specificity. These develop through a series of short studies, defining the spatial concerns and hierarchies of the Photographers Gallery. Here light appears to carve matter, forming luminous collective spaces between dark rectilinear galleries, which are resolved spatially and materially to achieve another lucidity.