UAL

In spring 2020 I spent an Erasmus semester in BA 3D Design at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London. The first months were shaped by the workshops, a busy campus, the library and a city I came to know a little better every day.

Then came the lockdown. The campus closed, teaching moved online ("Welcome back… sort of"), and because of COVID and Brexit I could not extend my stay. The semester took a different course than planned, yet it became one of the most formative periods of my studies.

My semester project was a redesign of the entrance gate of Stave Hill Ecological Park in Rotherhithe. The small nature reserve lies on the site of the former Stave Dock, once part of London's timber port, and has been looked after by The Conservation Volunteers since the late 1980s: grassland, woodland and wetland in the middle of the city, maintained by volunteers. My proposal was a gate of larch slats, each carrying the name of one of the park's volunteers, so that the entrance tells the story of the people who care for it. With every workshop in London closed, the carpentry workshop of the Zschornack family in Räckelwitz, old friends from home in Saxony, built prototypes of the timber and steel joints and sent them over, so I could continue developing the design. At the end of my stay I handed the project over to the team at the park; whether it has been built is not known to me.

Alongside the project I studied Richard Sennett's The Craftsman, a book on the value of doing a thing well for its own sake, and learned a great deal about weaving from Shane Waltener.