"Fatih,
Please can you keep this pillowcase on your table while you work?
Don't worry about keeping it clean - I want to get marks on it
I will come by next week and explain better
Maeve (the girl that you showed around your workshop)"
This is a note that I left on the workbench of Fatih, a dough mixer fixer working on Hastingwood Trading Estate in North London. This was the only note, everything else was done in person. It took a while to get to this point, Hastingwood is a very full-on environment. I walked around the lorries, the birds, the fumes, the beeps, the heat, the dust, the suspicious looks, the river, the forklifts, the pressure washers, the men, the smoking areas, the bins. I walked around until eventually I walked in.
I walked into as many units as I could and I got to know what people were working on. I met makers and menders of things that we use/eat/need every day; walkie-talkies, smart cars, suede garments, acoustic plywood sheets, double glazing, powder coating, bread, kebabs, window frames, signage, ducts, sculpture, clothes, ice-cream.
The owner of the dry cleaners on the edge of the estate gave me a pile of uncollected cleanly pressed white bedding. I distributed the pillowcases to thirteen different units, some people understood and some did not but they kept them anyway. The pillowcases stayed in their units for different amounts of time, ranging from a short tumble dryer cycle at the Ace of Suedes, to three weeks on the back of Colin's bin truck. The environment worked its way into the pillowcases as it had done on me, and when they all (bar one) came back together, they drew a kind of landscape of Hastingwood Trading Estate; blood, rust, red oxide, grease, sawdust, dough, oil, clay, atomised paint, steel dust, hot air.
The collaboration of incidental drawings was presented in The Valley Room which is located on the trading estate itself. The window of the small room was left open to let gusts of Hastingwood air throw the drawings into pillows again. A collection of photographs of the place were put inside a dried loaf of bread from Oz Bakery, on top of a pile of the pressed and folded white sheets.
This project was made in collaboration with AiR and was supported by Enfield Festival of Industry 2023
