Moving through the landscape: Arches and Cupolas

This is my second post exploring the brief 'My cultural map of Bradford'.  I had the idea of combining a ground route map of my typical journey through Bradford with visual representation of what I observe as I move through the landscape.

The journey I shall use is my walk from Forster Sq Station to the School of Art off Great Horton Rd.  This is the Bradford I know best - the street view.

I did some sketching and monoprinting from memory of the route but I wanted to really LOOK at it.  Covid means I can't visit so I took a walk via Google Maps Street view.

The image below shows the result.  Numerous screen shots from street level sliced up and joined together in an effort to portray the journey.

And then I looked and noted (in the green felt tip) what I could see.  One thing that really stood out for me was the numerous different arches and cupolas: railway arches, window arches, doorways and arches under City Hall.  

Numerous buildings also have assorted cupolas: "a rounded vault resting on a usually circular base and forming a roof or a ceiling"1.  Prominent cupolas adorn the Alhambra and the old Odeon building but there are others.

So I tried to capture some of these  

arches and cupolas by doing detailed drawings. Here are some examples.

I had a rough idea that I could make a semi-3D map using images of these arches and cupolas so I used stencils and monoprinting to create multiple examples.

See the following images for examples of these efforts.

I used different inks, colours and papers.  I wasn't too worried about the colours at this stage (partially because I had very few colours of ink to play with).  It was very much an experiment.

It turns out this was the easy bit. Armed with dozens of prints, I then set about trying to arrange them to express my journey.  I drew on the work of Mark Bradford (see previous post 'Mapping Cultural Demography in Bradford') to try and retain a sense of a map whilst bringing in images of arches and cupolas that decorate the buildings. I tried using pieces of darker paper to create the path through but I could not make that work.  In the end, I was most satisfied with arranging them in a basic geographical order: starting with the station arches and moving through the decorated victorian buildings (many of them banks) until I reached the cupolas of the Alhambra and Odeon buildings. This was my result.

What are my reflections on this outcome?  At a very basic level it does lead up the picture from my arrival at the station and its dark arches, through the more decorative arches of the town centre, finishing at the top with the cupolas near the Art College.  However, it could hardly be called a map.  Perhaps that doesn't matter as it does map something for me.  On the other hand, I'm not sure it conveys the architecture of Bradford very well and it may be helpful to carry out further research on the architects, materials and construction practices, particularly of Bradford's heyday in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  I also think the colours, whilst vivid and pleasing, do not convey the colours of Bradford - more like Istanbul as my partner remarked.  I think the monoprint method has produced some interesting outcomes which may be transferable to textile but I need to consider whether drawing and printing the arches at more acute angles may help express the idea of a landscape the viewer is moving through rather than looking at.  So further work involves developing a more appropriate colour palette, finding out more about the architecture that produced all this decoration, considering different angles for drawing the arches and experimenting with using these ideas on textiles.

1. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cupola