not really now not any more

The Abode of Love (Unrealised Project) | 2020

Some thoughts on an unrealised project: The Abode of Love (2020)

The wonderfully named ‘Abode of Love’ is a secluded area under the promenade at Exmouth beach. Dating back to the 1930s (or earlier), it's around 100 metres long and consists of nine concrete seating bays. Last year, the Town Council partnered up with the Thelma Hulbert Gallery in nearby Honiton to ask artists to consider its future. I was invited, with Megan Calver, to propose a way of engaging local young people creatively with the space, to encourage a sense of ownership and responsibility for it.

The Abode of Love is an ideal hideaway for all kinds of secretive activity (which is presumably also what earned this space its local nickname - and its bad reputation). One of the most notable features of the site was years-worth of overwritten graffiti. Far from being the usual tagging and spray-painting, the Abode’s graffiti mostly consisted of lightly scratched names and dates, and many references to sex and romance. Occasional high tides also leave their own mark on the site, washing away paint and depositing debris. Making frequent visits, we observed changes to the site over time and talked to some of the people who used it and cared for it.

Rather than erase or ignore the graffiti, Megan Calver and I devised a plan to work with local young people to amplify and transform what we found there, reading it closely and then taking it out of the shelter into the world through formalised speaking and walking actions (and ultimately through soundwork and publications). We were interested in why people wrote on and marked the space and what they hoped to achieve in these acts of private yet public expression. We also wondered about things that still needed to be said and if there might be alternative ways of sharing them. The work was partly informed by an enigmatic piece of graffiti at a train station that inspired Alan Garner’s 1973 novel Red Shift – “not really now not any more”. Written beneath two lovers’ names, the graffiti led Garner to create three intertwined stories of adolescent love, set in different time periods but within the same landscape.

Our proposal was initially accepted, but then circumstances changed and the Covid-19 epidemic hit. The gallery asked us to rethink our commission for a different site and suddenly the Abode was covered in colourful murals.

I feel disappointed that our proposal for this space has now been closed down indefinitely by the comprehensive overpainting of many layers of public writing. I wish we had enacted it, if only with friends. It raises all kinds of questions about what public space is for and who gets to use it: questions we rather hoped to explore with our young collaborators.