Sarah Ainslie, From Limehouse To Tilbury

 

 

Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie’s Drifting in the Peripheries of an Urban Landscape runs at House of Annetta, 25 Princelet St, E1 6QH, from 15th – 28th October, 10am-6pm daily. Sarah’s exhibition features large photomontages like the one above, while below I publish images from her concertina books tracing the path of the river, that will also be on display.

‘In 2018, I started wandering along the Thames from Limehouse to Tilbury documenting the peripheries of London where urban and rural life collide. A disappearing, endlessly changing landscape, so close to the city where vast monuments to late capitalism clash with the detritus of abandoned industry and traces of human life. Once bogs, marshes, farmland, then the docks that serviced the trade of empire in human beings, sugar, tobacco, coffee, rice and cotton along the arterial flow of the River Thames.

I was drawn to this exploration through the life of my grandfather who worked in Chiangmai, Thailand in the early 1900s and travelled to Bangkok from Tilbury. His father and grandfather were functionaries of the East India Company and my walks were part of searching for answers about my own colonial history.

Over the next seven years, I headed out with my camera, rolls of film, a map, a sandwich and water, taking the tube, Dockland Light Railway or train to the next destination and walking for hours and hours through these in-between worlds. No two journeys were the same, the time of day, the season, the weather and changing light transformed minute details. The magic of film meant that I could not see what I had captured until they were developed back in my darkroom.

I printed contact sheets, cut them up and edited these pictures into notebooks that became vessels containing images, maps and notes, along with questions and thoughts that lead to my next walk.’

Sarah Ainslie

 

Limehouse

Silvertown

Silvertown

Silvertown

Silvertown

Silvertown

Canning Town

Canning Town

Bow

Bow

Pontoon Dock

Pontoon Dock

Gallions Reach

Gallion’s Reach

Gallion’s Reach

Dagenham

Rainham

Rainham

Rainham

Purfleet

Purfleet

Grays

Tilbury

Tilbury

Tilbury

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie