Tim Webster: Design Strategy
The Line
Connecting Dementia’s Caring Community through Kite Flying and Making.
December 2020
MA Architecture
Royal College of Art
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Wrapping myself up in bed one night in an attempt to stay warm I was confronted with the huge installation of drying clothes which seemed to occupy the majority of my damp cold bedroom. Lying there I pictured the bright yellow washing line which darted between the trees and walls of my parent's garden. The line then shot over the back gate and stretched across the rooftops of their neighbourhood. I imagined the line stretching across the landscape I had seen so often from the train while travelling between my two homes. The line then began navigating London, wrapping around lamposts and stretching between TV aerials. The line finally reached my bedroom window; it was tied around the inside handle, trapped within the window’s rubber seal. Opening the window gave the line a bit of slack, enough so that I could feel my mum plucking away at the other end.
Extract from Creative Writing
FEEL DEEPLY, Oak Dowell, String, Parchment, Acrylic on Canvas
Outline of Topic
Care and Affinitive Space
The project begins with the questioning of a compartment of memories and emotions, one which centres around the last four years of my life and the observation of my mother’s continuing struggle with Alzheimer's disease. My mother's diagnosis and my family's life since, have led me to greatly re-consider my relationship to and understanding of space, and it is within this context that the values and aspirations of my project exist. I desire to frame this change in my life and my preconceptions of space as a eucatastrophe, one to inform positive change within a personal spatial discourse and practice.
Many of my observations and memories are related to the domestic environment in which they played out; finding certain labours, spaces and relationships to have changed in significance and meaning in recent years. But I intend to expand the scope of my project out of the domestic, and rather into a ‘third space’ one which shares qualities with the domestic such as familiarity and comfort, but is altogether less private, individual or familial. In an attempt at a definition, I have come to interpret my aspirations as the production of affinative space; finding affinity suggestive of a deep and understanding relationship, but one which unlike the domestic can be open to a collective or unfamiliar experience.
The project is also conceptually connected to the provision and reception of care. My perception of the act of care has also been significantly affected by my mother's illness, seeing a shift in my relationship with it as well as my psychology surrounding it; understand care now as a holistic, connecting and encompassing action, one which is tied to the space it exists within. I will investigate how space can encourage care and caregiving, not only between individuals but also collectives, and how it is inherent within the coined spaces of affinity.
COMPOUND, Oak Dowell, String, Parchment, Acrylic on Canvas
UP AT THE CHEST, Oak Dowell, String, Parchment, Acrylic on Canvas
Research Methods and Approaches
Speculative Narration and Introspection
Last year I began to engage within the methodology of Critical Fabulation, and I aspire to continue its involvement within my research practice. An approach first offered by Saidiya Hartman in her 2008 work Venus in Two Acts, Critical Fabulation encourages “the use of storytelling and speculative narration as a means of redressing history’s omissions”, used especially to creatively critique archives, revealing the narratives that they might have neglected. The methodology utilises fiction as a means of proposing truths that may not have been documented, as well as the capacity of narrative to engage audiences and encourage further speculation and thought within them.
Using Critical Fabulation, I would like to redirect its focus towards a personal archive, one surrounding my mother's illness and its effect on me, to combine the methodology with a process of introspection to find new narratives and connections within a bank of memories, which without the process of documenting will disappear. This process of introspection is inspired by Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of the Umwelt, employing the idea of reality as a subjective representation, a mental model, one which when interrogated could inform the production of affinitive space where care is embedded within its character.
Writing and narration are key tools within the introspective research I am currently undertaking. I intend to critique my own use of language as a tool for research and design, finding new connections and narratives between the words as well as the narratives I am working with. This focus on language is also partly inspired by my mother's illness, having found the degradation of her communication skills to be as significant to my her environmental experience as spatial qualities or actions are. I believe that my search for affinitive space will be aided by challenging and participating with language as a material within the project.
Design Methods and Approaches
Lines to Model Language and Space
My design approaches stem from an analysis of a piece of introspective writing, where I describe the interactions between my mother and me while hanging laundry in the garden. The laundry was hung on a line darting around their small back garden, tied to trees and walls; it is this line which has been taken forward as the primary design tool, both in metaphor and its physicality.
Firstly I understand the ‘line’ as a device which connects two points, within space or metaphor; but within this connection, too exists a division on either side of the line. This division becomes more apparent when the line becomes more definitive and concrete, be it a wall between communities and nations or the ideologies behind them. My task will be to create lines which retain the initial connection between points, while affecting the lightest spatial division, one which has the ability to connect rather than divide. This symbolically connecting as opposed to divisive space I see as paramount to the creation of affinitive space and space which can support caring relationships.
I will be designing primarily through the making of 1:1 models, of both space and language. I intend to move from an iterative model-making process to the assembly of installations, finally accumulating in a spatial proposition or product. I have engaged so far with the process of 1:1 kite production, where the kites represent memories and moments within the narratives I have developed. These memories are prevented from erasure by holding the line and suspending the model in the sky. The use of 1:1 models is inspired by various practitioners, one of the most relevant examples being Thomas Demand, whose meticulous fictionalised reproductions of collective memories allow for an open interpretation. Linguistically the work of Ian Hammilton Finlay has proven influential to the project, where like Finlay I am attempting to refine my longer autobiographical writings into shorter openly allegorical pieces, whose interpretation is more accessible.
WHITE HORSE, Oak Dowell, String, Tin Foil
BEGIN TO SINK, Oak Dowell, String, Parchment, Acrylic on Canvas
Will you stay a while, or are you just passing through, Inkjet Print on Paper
is an imagined phrase, one I fictionally attribute to my Grandma and attempts to expresses our families navigation of my mothers alzheimer’s at two scales.
Firstly It speaks to the scale of a day or a weekend. After I left home to continue my life in London my Grandma, who lives across the road from my parents, took over from me as my mothers secondary carer after my father. Returning home now, my mother passes between our house and my grandparents to receive care. When I am visiting, my Grandma will always enquire how long I will be at home for with an emphasis that whether it be a long or short stay my presence is appreciated. There is a tension I see within her questioning; one which is encouraging of my life in London and the enjoyment of it, while also a painful desire for me to stay so that I can help with the workload of care and also spend as much time with my mother while she still knows me.
The second scale is that of my anxieties about the years to come. My mothers illness will inevitably shorten her life, while also diminishing her ability to live happily or knowingly the life she has left. In the year following my mothers diagnosis, I would perhaps selfishly feel that my family situation was deeply unfair. But now a few years on, the pace of my mothers degradation has numbed me into some kind of acceptance, It feels like a slow and passing goodbye, yet I still struggle to imagine the future milestones of my life for which she will likely be absent for.
Kites
Toys to Overcome Time, Gravity and Memory
I have found Kite making to not only be an apt expression of the relationship between care and the line which my project is exploring but also an appropriate method for the design approaches of spatial and language modelling which I am keen to engage with. I first found the kite through one of my autobiographical writings, but after researching the craft following an intuitive attraction, I have found multiple relations to my project.
Kites saw their most significant and final constructive use at the very beginning of the 20th Century, where an experimental process to their creation led to two breakthroughs that would shape the century to come. In North Carolina, the Wright brothers pioneering work in aviation began with the iterative testing of kites at various scales, these kites were slowly transformed into the fixed wing which allowed them to make the first heavier-than-air aircraft to take flight. In doing so the Wright brothers ended the kite's use as humanity's primary medium to study and express the sky. Alexander Graham Bell also fanatically made kites throughout his life, especially in the years following his invention of the telephone. In the years following, Wittgenstein while studying engineering would also work iteratively with kites within the field of aeronautical engineering. While Wittgenstein would give up engineering and kite-making to pursue philosophy, Susan Saerrett suggests in her 2006 book Wittgenstein Flies a Kite, that it was the process of working with physical models at scale, that would heavily influence his theories of language as a collection of articulated propositions which mirrors the world. Indeed it seemed at that during the turn of the century, may developments were paired with a kite building practice as a hobby or as experimentation. I am planning on returning the kite to its previous use as a tool to experiment with technology, space, language and understanding, where the iterative model-making of kites and language can lead to a holistic personal spatial dialogue. Therefore I am keen to continue using the kite to explore model-making as a practice which deals with space and language in tandem, to create spaces of affinity.
Hexagonal kite built by Alexander Graham Bell and team, 1902. Bell Collection National Geographic.
Triangular kite built by Alexander Graham Bell and team, 1902. Bell Collection National Geographic.
Box Kite, Oak Dowell, String, Parchment, Acrylic on Canvas
With the Kite as a metaphor for care as I have grown to understand it, a relationship with a turbulent invisible force that must be mediated through an anchored connection, I plan on experimenting with kites as models for spaces of affinity. Developing communally flown kites and spatial and linguistic installations in the sky. By doing so I wish to bring my practice to a more accessible space, still inspired by my experiences, but not necessarily a narration of them, a performative experience which any kite flyer or viewer can feel an affinity towards. I intend to collaborate my practice with a social community, to bring the connecting and reflective power of the kite to organisations and individuals. Hopefully, within the performative and collaborative acts of kite-making and flying, spaces of shared affinity can be created, one where people can contemplate loss and turbulence and connect within the process. The most obvious collaboration for me to seek is the community of carers surrounding dementia which I was once part of, but I do think the metaphor of the line can be open to all those who wish to retain a connection to loss.
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