Regent Street ⁄ Regent’s Park (Dickens thought it looked like a racetrack), 2009

Regent Street / Regent’s Park (Dickens Thought It Looked Like a Racetrack) investigates major 19th-century urban development changes that, for the first time, favoured the individual’s freedom of movement, while its architecture restricted collective movement and gatherings. For this work, I roamed Regent Street and the area around the park for several days, photographing as many shop and street signs, fences, and barriers as I could. I subsequently redrew and scanned them all, then installed them in a true-to-scale site plan of the streets. The result is an overload of pictures, logos, signals, and signs that regulate the movements and perceptions of passersby.