Gardens in the Sky

“A certain quality of loveliness,” this was the phrase the presenter on one of those old house restoration programmes on television kept using. A certain hue of 19th century floor tile, the roughness of a roof support or the angle of a pitched floor could be deemed to possess this quality, this “certain quality of loveliness.” He used the phrase perhaps five or six times on the episode I watched. He ascribed it to certain features it as if it was an accepted measure of architectural worth, as ready-readable as the Richter Scale. It got on my nerves after a while.

Yet, I have to admit that a “certain quality of loveliness” is exactly what Gemma Anderson’s map Wild Photograms has.



It is a map of a small part of Belfast between High Street and North Street. In City Supplements, a publication produced by PS squared, www.pssquared.org, Anderson explains the map's inception:

Rather than concentrating on street level, I gazed up at the brickwork of the buildings looking for plant life. I was surprised by how many plants were living in the nooks and crannies of derelict buildings. These ‘gardens in the sky’ growing on roof tops, edges and window ledges. The area now appeared more curious and rich walking amongst these plant outcrops [ … ] I have used the stems of these plants to construct a map and documented the full plant forms as photograms, their locations identified on the map.

www.gemma-anderson.co.uk is the artist’s website.