Working more with the tiles that I've created, and inspired by the mosaics of Lisbon, I'm hoping to create more brutalist concrete pieces in the coming months. The first of these is a composite of the Barbican estate. These prints use abstract shapes and absences to create a fractured view of our perception of the estate and its use of concrete architecture. Printing onto these surfaces is a real challenge, but I'm excited to find more ways of using material to represent urban environments.
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I had a lovely visit to Lisbon in February (despite a horrendous bout of food poisoning) and enjoyed the art, architecture and lifestyle. One of the highlights was a walk along the southern pier. It's an unusual stretch, full of abandoned factories and graffiti. To commemorate the trip and that nice walk, I created this print of a stark, unused crane at the water's edge, with the looming Ponte 25 de Abril suspension bridge.
Thamesmead is a strange place. Formerly on military land in south London, this estate was considered to be a huge solution to overcrowding issues in the 1960s, and an opportunity to create a Utopian community using state of the art architectural technology. The vast estate was cast in concrete and it wasn't long before social problems emerged, owing in large part to the complete lack of amenities, social infrastructure, and paucity of transport options. Today, the population of Thamesmead stands at around 30,000, and these people are living in the shadows of gang issues that wracked the estate in the 80s and 90s, along with the broken promises from private investment and the council. My visit earlier in the year was nothing but pleasant, bumping into nice people and enjoying some of the new green spaces and shopping structures. Thinking about how the perception of the concrete environment has changed since Thamesmead's construction, I wanted to capture a sense of tension around the promise of architectural plans and the reality of their construction. This print is a fractured view of two scenes at Thamesmead, put through different prisms to create a window into how we relate to modern architecture.
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Tadhg CaffreyI'm an Irish printmaker, living in North London and focusing on urban landscape, construction and abstract geometry. My first name sounds like "tiger" without the last bit.
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February 2018
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