Harriet Mena Hill Paints a Demolished Estate Onto Its Own Concrete

Hi-Fructose has a wonderful piece about Harriet Mena Hill's Aylesbury Fragments, a series of paintings made directly on pieces of concrete salvaged from the demolition of the Aylesbury Estate in South East London.

I love these.

The idea is simple enough to explain, but the more I look at the work the more perfect the choice of material feels. Hill paints fragments of the estate's buildings, hallways, windows and balconies onto broken pieces of the buildings themselves. A chunk of concrete that would otherwise be hauled away as demolition waste becomes a tiny portrait of the place it came from.

The shape of each piece is part of the painting. Broken edges become the boundaries of buildings. Holes, cracks and rough surfaces remain visible. Some pieces are narrow and vertical, others squat or irregular, and occasionally she finds a rare fragment where two flat surfaces meet at a corner and the painting can wrap around it.

They look a little like artifacts recovered from some much older civilization, except the thing being remembered was somebody's apartment building.

That is probably what gets me about them.

The Aylesbury Estate was built between 1963 and 1977 as a huge social housing project, with about 2,700 homes and roughly 10,000 residents. Over time it developed a terrible public reputation and became an example frequently used in discussions about failed social housing and urban decay.

Hill started working with people on the estate through arts education in 2018 and says what she actually encountered was quite different from that reputation. She found young people who were engaged, friendly and supportive of one another. That experience led her to think about how a community can become reduced to a story told about it by politicians and the media, particularly when the people who actually live there have very little control over that story.

As demolition and redevelopment continued, she began collecting pieces of concrete from the estate. The fragments have to actually come from Aylesbury. She has apparently turned down perfectly good pieces of concrete offered from elsewhere because that would miss the entire point.

I really like that constraint.

If this were simply about finding an interesting surface to paint on, any piece of broken concrete would work. But these aren't interesting canvases that happen to contain paintings of Aylesbury. The concrete is part of the subject. It was physically there. It was part of a wall, hallway, stairwell or home. Somebody walked past it every day. Somebody may have leaned against it while talking to a neighbor or carried groceries past it on the way home.

Then the building came down.

Hill picks up a piece and paints the place back onto it.

There is something beautiful about that.

The paintings themselves make the idea even stronger because they aren't sterile architectural studies. You see windows glowing at night, washing hanging from balconies, graffiti and other little traces that tell you people lived inside all that concrete. The brutalist geometry is still there, but the paintings continually pull your attention back toward the lives inside it.

Hill describes the project as one of memory and restitution, and that seems exactly right. She isn't arguing that buildings can never change or that an aging housing estate must remain untouched forever. Cities change. Buildings eventually come down. The interesting question is what happens to the memory of the people and communities attached to those places when they do.

Usually demolition is very good at erasing that evidence.

A building becomes rubble, the rubble gets removed, something new gets built, and eventually the previous place survives mostly in photographs and the memories of people who were there.

These paintings interrupt that process in a small way. Some of the building gets to remain.

I also like the companion project, Soft Concrete. Hill makes large portraits of the estate's buildings from felt, using an extremely soft domestic material to depict the hard concrete structures. It is almost the inverse of The Aylesbury Fragments. In one project she takes the actual hard material of the buildings and turns it into something intimate. In the other she takes wool and uses it to reconstruct massive brutalist architecture.

Both seem to be asking us to look at the place differently.

What I appreciate most, though, is that Hill's involvement with Aylesbury did not begin with deciding that the estate would make interesting artwork. It began by working with the people who lived there. Years later she is still running workshops with residents, including a group of older people she has worked with since 2020.

There is a line near the end of the Hi-Fructose interview that says a lot about her relationship with the community. When those residents get together, she says:

"My artist life is not really in the room. It doesn't need to be."

I like that almost as much as the paintings.

There is a danger in making art about a community undergoing displacement that the people themselves become material too. Hill seems very aware of that. The project comes out of relationships, conversations and years spent around the estate rather than treating Aylesbury as an interesting ruin to photograph before it disappears.

Maybe that is why the paintings feel so different to me.

They aren't really paintings of ruined buildings.

They are small physical pieces of a place carrying the memory of what used to surround them.

I love work where the material isn't incidental to the idea, and I can't imagine a better material for these paintings. A photograph can document a building. A painting can remember it. Harriet Mena Hill somehow managed to make the building participate in remembering itself.

Read Andy Smith's interview with Harriet Mena Hill at Hi-Fructose.

Explore Harriet Mena Hill's work and The Aylesbury Fragments.