Southwark Park, London 2004/2005

For over a year, as part of REAP, the park rangers of Southwark Park allowed me to use a private part of the park filled with extraordinarily rich and dark clues of the lives of former inhabitants. Some parts had a particularly sinister atmosphere giving clues that echoed the various stories that abounded about what had happened here before the abandonment of the space. I hung 7 second-hand flowery dresses every week for one year in the garden and in the various derelict buildings. The dresses, ‘alive’ and flowing in the wind yet ‘empty,’ echoed the presence/non presence of the entire space. Like the garden, the dresses revealed fecund clues of their former habitation. They rotted at different rates and some became a part of nature, losing their manufactured interim and becoming indistinguishable from the entropy of the garden itself.  For 8 weekends, at the end, I led groups through the garden.