Writing

Observational Writing Pieces

Wednesday 19th February 2025
Burgess Park, Bermondsey, London
15:27 - 16:15
Overcast day, patches of rain
Beginning of sunset

Picnics and birthday parties.
Pitiful attempts at couch to 5 k.
I have daily encounters with this park.
Today she is grey and overcast. With teenagers playing football dangerously close to where we are walking. Ball to the face trauma resurfaces. Two girls roller skate past.

The park is skinny and long, split in two by a small road. The first half of the park houses a small lake. Ducks and geese live here, and the occasional turtle/ terrapin? A communal garden and coffee shop sits next to a playground area. The shop sells magnets and soap and pins and hot water bottles and jars and jams and jewelry and ceramic vases and bags and umbrellas and bookmarks and chocolates and socks and posters.
And coffee.

In summertime there is barely room to stretch out on the grassy mound not far from the coffee shop. A good sunbathing spot. Trees dot the infant hill providing occasional shady spots to protect precious ice cream cones and take away ice lattes from melting in the sun's harsh gaze. Today however is quite the opposite - people walk quickly from tree to tree, it has begun to rain ever so slightly. The park has different moods season to season, being the most pleasant in late summer (i think).

The park is bordered by houses on one of its long sides by terrace houses, the other by much of the same, plus a school and a garage. There are infrequent trees planted along the bordering pavements. Now brown and in hibernation mode, they stand to attention quietly, creepily. There are bus stops and streetlights and mail boxes and gates and fences and planters and walkers and runners. Signposts and maps and paths and restricted zones and traffic signs.
There are also:

Three play areas
Seven tennis courts
One basketball court
One BMX track
One public library
Two war memorials
One football pitch
One cricket ground
One fishing building
Two outdoor gym areas
Two coffee shops
One creative workspace
One pilates studio
Two woodland areas
One footbridge
5 public toilets

And one historical Lime Kiln.

Amongst the lists and the people and the weather there is a fisherman who sets up his tent in the mornings on sunday, and a run club and a tennis group. There is a new man working at the coffee shop who makes a terrible dirty chai, which is understandable as I asked him if he had ever had one to which he replied “No”. There is a woman who feeds the pigeons and a communal garden where one can volunteer. There is nothing grand about the park, no big write-home worthy event that takes place here, but it is a place I have come to know well, passing by every day, not necessarily going through or spending copious amounts of time in however a space that is integral to my daily existence. Noticing her daily visitors, her regular pedestrians and changing coffee shop workers, rediscovering the familiar that is taken for granted, taken for being concrete, on which your soles tread on without your feet ever touching.

Earth piece
Yoko Ono, 1963 spring

Listen to the sound of the earth moving

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Wednesday 19th February 2025 10:05 am
Home
Bermondsey, London

Four walls, rectangular and long, as in the nature of a rectangle but this one is unusually long. Unassuming yellowish-brown brick work with white pvc windows, 4 facing the front of the close in which the house sits. Standing next to number 2 and number 4, originally (presumably) built the same and extended later. Our house has a porch unlike 2 and 4, handy for dumping wet shoes and dripping umbrellas - it rains a lot in the city. We have lived here for two years now - it shows. KnickKnacks and crap placed carefully in all corners of every room, a curated selection of our material wealth. Plants, printed photographs, candles and records make up our fortune. A shared museum of memories. The living room is home to a large window facing the small, concrete back garden. Sun facing. The windowsill holds our plant children. Monkey plants, cactuses, padron pepper seedlings, and ones I can not name make up our small makeshift greenhouse.

Seasons change the atmosphere of the room. Summer is the most pleasant. The back wall seems not to exist - door constantly open and windows ajar, the outside is welcomed in. We like it that way. Winter is harsher in the room, but relief can be found in the sun's painterly presence, often in the morning and late afternoon, when we are fortunate enough to notice. The Sun's fleeting presence, her rays make their way through the windows, catching on the leaves and pots on their path into the room. Leaves dance on the walls, dappled yellow warmth paints the off white walls of our slightly cluttered but cosy home.

These four walls I have cried, laughed, fought and made up in. Sometimes my prison, sometimes my sanctuary. She doesn’t change, we like to keep things in their place, in their designated space. Never changing yet constantly different, I am provided with the gift of everyday life. I feel safe in my space. My experiences and material possessions picked up along the way of my journeys to and fro places of normality make up that which I call home. My fortune of familiarity, made more evident when I find myself in those rare moments shared with the Sun in my living room. An unexpected yet welcomed guest, intangible but somehow touchable, these moments of quiet contemplation help to make the vastness of everything that surrounds us seem clear and close to me. A little closer to understanding my place, my space within the everyday concreteness of the world to which I call mine, yet sometimes feel I am not yet a part of. This is why I appreciate the change in my normality. Sometimes the world spins so slowly it seems as if time stands still, and others so quickly it seems impossible for my legs to keep up. My corner of the world for the moment may be unassuming, yet daily changes make it worthy of note. Everyday the sun hits my living room at a different angle, and everyday is different from the last. I just have to observe.

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Writing for final university project
Ode to Perec

(context)
French Novelist Georges Perec’s 1974 novel ‘Species of Spaces and Other Pieces’ holds an important, poetic perspective on the spaces we occupy - our houses, our cities, our universe. Perec’s writing circles around exploring how we notice our space, and suggests how we can appreciate and experience it better. He examines the micro space to the macro space, analysing the domestic to the wider world through essays, anecdotes, lists, memories and series of instructions. Perec was a member of Oulipo ( Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, meaning Workshop of Potential Literature), a French group of writers and mathematicians founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Oulipo explored methods of generating new literary styles by using constraints found in writing, and ones they made up themselves. Oulipo’s influence on Perec’s ‘Species of Spaces’ is clear in his clever use of lists and instructions, his page layouts exploring materialised space and the poetic reading of his work. His instructions are something that I explored deeply, in conjunction with Yoko Ono’s 1964 ‘Grapefruit’, a book containing a series of drawings and instructions which I found emulated a similar feeling of exploring existence. ‘Species of Spaces’ perhaps is a calling, a sort of encouragement to the reader and the world to observe and experience deeply the space that surrounds us, to see the details in the boring and to perceive the world through a new lens.


The Bedroom


A place of dwelling, personal comfort and physical being is something everyone is entitled to, deserving of and a necessity. Our everyday space tells us something about the person we are, about how we sit within the wider world. I will be briefly looking at passages from Georges Perec’s ‘Species of Spaces and Other Pieces’ to explore the familiar and the everyday, mainly of the bedroom, and ask why we should pay more attention to this space.

In Species of Space, Perec moves between different scales of spaces, beginning with the page and moving onto the bed. He talks of the bed being a place of mystery and adventure, from within the comfort of your own space.

“It was lying face-down on my bed that I read Twenty Years After, The Mysterious Island and Jerry on the Island. The bed became a trapper’s cabin, or a lifeboat on the raging ocean, or a baobab tree threatened by fire, a tent erected in the desert [...].”
“I traveled a great deal at the bottom of my bed. For survival, I carried sugar lumps I went and stole from the kitchen and hid under my bolster.”

The bedroom, stemmed from childhood, is a place of magic and possibility. Bedtime stories and night tales are told to children tucked up in duvets, story books are read and toys live in our beds and scattered across the floor. We read in bed, we watch tv in bed. We talk on the phone and drink tea and think about the world from the bedroom. The bedroom is perhaps the ultimate place of intimacy and personality - what we collect, find most precious and sentimental is often kept in the bedroom. It is a personal collection, a museum of curiosities, of our knick knacks and crap that accumulate over the period of our short existence that tell a story about who we are as people, who we used to be and our hopes for the person we may one day become:

“The passage of time (my history) leaves behind a residue that accumulates: photographs, drawings, […] postcards, books, dust and knickknacks: this is what I call my fortune.”

We see the contents of our bedrooms everyday, seeing the same collections of things and stuff so often they often become invisible. The bedroom and the normal however is where we often forget to look closely and find potential inspiration, aspects about our daily lives and about us as beings we didn't see before. To see the invisible in the visible gives us a new understanding of a space and where we sit within that space.

“I like ceilings, I like the mouldings and ceiling roses. They often serve me instead of a Muse and the intricate embellishments in the plasterwork put me readily in mind of those other labyrinths, woven phantasmas, ideas and words. But people no longer pay attention to ceilings.”

Perec is not necessarily talking just about mouldings and ceiling roses here; there is the sense that we have forgotten to see the beauty in the boring. The modern day and the outside world is so brilliant and bright that thighs that once were mystified and taken care of seem inconsequential now. Perec develops on this point at the end of the book when he writes about space and the world. There is a certain surprise and disappointment to travelling. Of crossing the globe and seeing the wonders of the world. The hopes of finding something about yourself perhaps, the illusion of being far away from home.

“To cover the world, to cross it in every direction, will only ever be to know a few square meters of it, […] it will be three children perhaps running along a bright white road, or else a small house on the way out of Avignon, with a wooden lattice door once painted green, the silhouetted outline of trees on top of a hill near Saarbrücken, […] And with these, the sense of the worlds concreteness, irreducible, immediate, tangible, of something clear and close to us: of the world, no longer as a journey having constantly to be remade, not a race without end […] but the rediscovery of a meaning, the perceiving that the earth is a form of writing, a geography of which we had forgotten that we ourselves are the authors.”

I find his passage at the end of the book strangely emotional. The vastness of the world seems hazy and glows faintly of possibilities and choices. Too many choices, too easy to become lost. There is something to be said about the ordinary, the seemingly dull that is a space to escape from. There is nothing to say this is wrong, I myself ache to see what the corners of the world hold and see everything there is to be seen. However, there is a lack of respect for the everyday surprises we find within the spaces we dwell. We have forgotten how to appreciate the normal, to look at the mouldings in the ceiling and to look at our knick knacks and postcards and posters in our bedrooms. Space and dwellings and bedrooms - our bodies spend so much time here it is easy to forget to see the details in amongst the everyday. To understand and interact with our surroundings, to realise the connection our bodies have with the segmented portion of the world we are given is to develop understanding and contextualisation of the world and thus ourselves. To rediscover the familiar is to rediscover something that is most true and dear and grounding to us. We are indeed species of our space, so why don't we give our attention and appreciation to it?

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https://disegnojournal.com/newsfeed/clay-pudding-gabriel-tan?rq=clay%20pudding

Clay Pudding
6 June

If you have been to Portugal, chances are you have tried, or at least seen, a Portuguese flan, or Pudim de Ovos. It has a smooth, creamy texture and rich caramel sauce on top. This is what product designer Gabriel Tan had in mind when creating what he calls his Flan Table.
Tan is an industrial designer from Singapore, but relocated to Porto with his wife Cherie Er in 2020. Together, the pair founded Origin Made, a crafts-focused design studio dedicated to preserving cultural heritage through reinterpreting traditional design processes and contemporary forms. “We wanted to create a brand that tells the story of Iberian craft. That’s how it was born, collaborating with small, family run workshops and connecting them to international designers,” Tan explains.
One of the brand’s most recent designs is a ceramic side table, designed by Tan and produced by Porto-based ceramicist Joaquim Pombal, that will be showcased during Copenhahen’s Three Days of Design. Standing half a meter tall, the table poses a modest body, with soft curves and a tactile, earthen surface. The table comes in two colours – a sandy light tan which is the natural colour of the clay, and a rich bronze resulting from the clay being oxidised. “It’s not super grainy,” Tan explains. “It’s a tactile piece that you want to touch. It feels quite earthy and natural.”

Tan wanted a name that connected the table to his own experiences in Portugal, explaining how “flan, or pudim, is a very typical Portuguese dessert you find in restaurants.” The table design was born from an organic encounter with materials Tan found in Pombal’s studio. “The first time we visited him we were fascinated by what he was making,” Tan recalls. “We asked him if he could make something in this brown caramel colour we saw. We wanted something that was subtle, but that let the colour itself shine,” he says. “It wasn’t an idea we already had. It was more seeing what he made and developing the idea after visiting him.”
Tan strongly believes in the importance of collaboration when working with local craftspeople to try and find a harmony between contemporary design and traditional craft. “Design is not really a world that is connected to craft in Portugal; it’s not like Japan or Italy where there is a closer collaboration between the two industries,” he explains.“When I came here, I was fascinated by entering the old world, where you have so much heritage and craft and traditions. I saw ways that I could use these ingredients to create something new.”
Tan and Pombal’s Flan table is the result of the meeting of two worlds, offering a dialogue between contemporary forms and traditional making. “I think our audience really appreciates that, because when you have old craft and rich textures applied in minimal forms, it’s easier to use in contemporary spaces,” Tan says. “We have a studio that works with a keen sense of responsibility: to preserve and carry on the human craft tradition. It’s a part of the culture of our world.”

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https://disegnojournal.com/newsfeed/ambient-one-ambient-works?rq=ambient%20helper

An Ambient Helper
10 Jun

Sawdust, silicone, ceramics, spray paint. Workshops are like Aladdin’s cave, if Aladdin's cave were full of carcinogens. “You might be aware of what you’re making and what those materials create in terms of pollution, but you have no idea what the person next to you is doing, and whether they’re also looking at that aspect,” Giulio Ammendola, the co-founder of Ambient Works, tells me.
To address this issue, Ammendola and his fellow co-founder Yuki Machida have set about designing a device to help users understand how to improve the air quality in their workshops and studios, after discovering that health concerns are a common concern amongst designers and makers. Ambient One is an air quality monitor designed to alert makers to the potential pollutants their work may be producing, and give tailored advice on how to minimise this via their user-friendly app. Ambient One is in its early stages of life, and will be launched through Kickstarter on 11 June 2024.
“It’s quite industrial looking,” I say. “Yeah it’s a mix of things,” Ammendola replies. “One thing we realised was that it needed to be pretty small and sturdy to survive the environments it was being put through.” Weighing 300g, Ambient One has an outer shell of milled aluminium, protecting an inner sensor. The device is utilitarian yet playful, with a bright orange handle and simple display face where two blinking eyes greet you when the device is turned on. It’s like something out of WALL-E, I think. “It feels like a bit of fresh air compared to normal smart home devices that often feel like science lab products,” Ammendola says. “We hope that's also the seeds of something we can continue to build upon and make health-related devices that help people, but are also fun to use.”

As well as being rather charming, Ambient One is constantly scanning for the four most common pollutants found in creative spaces. “It tracks particulate matter, NOx [from welding or car engines] , CO2, and VOCs - the gasses in the air,” Ammendola tells me, pointing to the small display screen. All of this data is tracked, logged and presented back to the user on Ambient One’s app via tailored AI-driven tips.
Last year Machida and Ammendola secured a small catalyst fund from Innovative UK, with a proposal explaining how they wanted to improve the wellbeing of creatives in England. “It’s something that is not very well known, but we spend most of our time indoors where air quality can be five times worse than outdoor air,” Ammendola says.
“For example, in ceramic studios, there are silica particles, which people getting into ceramics or pottery might not know about, which can lead to Silicosis [an incurable lung disease],” Machida adds. “We wanted to try and help creatives and makers that are spending all their time in these environments.”

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