Emma Bowkett commissioned me for MY LONDON, for the PHOTO LONDON supplement of the FT weekend magazine this year
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MY LONDON, PHOTO LONDON SUPPLEMENT, Financial Times Weekend Magazine, 4th May 2024, to accompany PHOTO LONDON at Somerset House
In Chumleigh Gardens, in a quiet corner of Camberwell in London, palm tree fronds shade an intricately tiled pond, its geometric forms recalling Moorish and Islamic design. The garden is a hidden oasis created in 1995 to reflect the multiculturalism of its local inhabitants. Nearby stand the ruins of a 19th century limestone kiln, which was used to smelt chalk into quicklime to light London’s theatres before the invention of electricity. Both chalk and palm trees are close to my heart, both appearing in the fossil record of the Cretaceous period. I grew up among palm lined plazas and gardens in Buenos Aires, and from time to time would fly to the UK to visit my family in Dorset, where chalk and shale are commonly found among the fossils of the Jurassic coast. Here, I have brought my photographs of the palm trees of Chumleigh Gardens together with silver-gelatin prints made by my grandfather, migrant to Argentina at the turn of the century. He was fascinated by these landscaped gardens and squares, such as Plaza Independencia in Montivideo, which commemorated independence from Spanish colonial powers, and that he would travel to for work. He would often take curious self-portraits with his Leica camera, in front of the palm trees. These attest to a kind of kinship he felt to these gentle giants: both tall, alien species in a new land. He would often title these images: ‘The palm tree and I’ in his photographic albums. They were ornamental and had only recently been added to the beautifully designed gardens of Buenos Aires. Here, I have used chalk from the south west coasts to frottage onto this collage of his photographic images, an amalgamation of my images of Chumleigh gardens’ palm trees, and his, leaving my fingerprints, my DNA, on the corners of the image. In this way, I am creating a haptic dialogue with my grandfather, as well as a record of my encounter with the landscapes of deep time.
VICTORIA AHRENS 