Artist Stephen Walter: ‘My maps are all about human residues and traces’

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/10/stephen-walter-artist-map-maker-london-interview

Version 0 of 1.

I meet Stephen Walter outside the Aquatics Centre at the Olympic Park in east London, in order to walk back to his studio near Fish Island on the River Lea just beyond the perimeter fence. Walter is London’s compulsive cartographer. His hand-drawn map, The Island, which views the whole metropolis through a labour-of-love series of tiny pencil-noted public and private associations, all set adrift in a Kentish and home counties sea, is one of the indelible reimaginings of a city that has always lived most vividly in the minds of its artists.

The Island, about to be published in book form, is part oral history, part folklore, part personal homage, and was completed in 2008, when this park was still being cleared. Walter denoted the site as a set of Olympic rings between the football pitches of “hack ’em down” marshes and an ironic “end of the world” line that marks the border with Newham (“worst life expectancy – female”) and competing associations of “McGrath Waste Management: a terrace of clank and dust, hear the noise and feel it in your eyes”, “paint, glue and parafin[sic]” works, “African mirical [sic] believers” and “new city pads?”. If he were to redraw his Island now – and he has plans to do maybe two or three more versions in his lifetime – then it would include one or two different magnifying-glass impressions of the place he has experienced since then, which he annotates in conversation as we walk.

For a start, a revamped map might record that those “paint glue and parafin” factories had been compulsorily purchased. And that in their place had come the stadiums and the Olympic Village, sold off as the “city pads” he prophesied, the Westfield shopping centre, landed from Oz, what he calls by turns a “modernist utopia seen through a corporate prism”, “a consumption theme park for somnambulists”, “a monolith of organised fun”, and a “futurist battleground for West Ham and Millwall fans”.

Walter’s studio has been on the margin of this site throughout the transformation. He remembers when the blue fence went up around the Olympic Park and construction began. He is an inveterate urban adventurer – for his subsequent subterranean version of his Island map Walter occasionally wandered old sewers with his friend, the celebrated “place hacker” Bradley Garrett, (motto: explore everything), who, he says, treats “the whole urban landscape as if he were a curious child”. In this sense, to Walter, a cheerful trespasser, the blue fence was fighting talk. “I broke in and started walking around the Olympic construction site on a Friday afternoon,” he remembers. “There was no one around except a few bods in yellow jackets. I was just exploring the abandoned factories. Litter-strewn, stripped out, the titty calendars still on walls. I love that idea of ruin – it is food for the curious brain. Anyway, I was wandering around and this security car pulls up and an eastern European skinhead guy got out and pointed a machine gun at me.”

The full-on Olympic experience, I suggest. What happened?

“I was like ‘Easy – I just got lost.’ Fortunately he had a colleague with him, a London Rasta, who calmed him down and asked me quite politely to leave.”

We walk along the wide post-Olympic avenues, with their insistent flags still flapping three years after the event: “Discover. Share. Enjoy.” We are the only people in evidence. “It was odd here before,” Walter says. “Almost like a borderland, quite creative. It was tacky, but things were being made. Quite big factories, and a mix of small business and design studios. I don’t know whether it will ever be properly used now, it will always be becoming something. Still, there is an Apple Store at Westfield, so I can’t really complain.”

I suppose you could say that Walter works in the same tradition or space as Iain Sinclair or Peter Ackroyd, London’s psychogeographers, but what he does is both more visual and freer in spirit. His studio, when we get there, exists in that developers’ limbo between warehouse – it was part of the Percy Dalton salted peanut factory – and loft apartment. The rent is due for renegotiation in five years at which time, Walter imagines, the artists and makers will be priced out, having served their hipster purpose, and the buildings will become asset-class residential opportunities. In the meantime, the space is the perfect home for his site-specific one-man industry.

The walls are lined with fastidious works in progress in Walter’s two chosen forms – firstly, semi-abstract landscapes and wildernesses, each one intensely finely detailed, full of recurrent hand-drawn natural details, and secondly, maps and plans. He is working on the first draft of a commission from a charity called Flash of Splendour Arts, which works particularly with autistic and refugee children. The commission is to update the maps that accompanied Poly-Olbion, John Drayton’s epic poem of the counties of Britain, published in two parts in 1612 and 1622. Walter’s early outline views Britain – topically – spreading out from Edinburgh; he is using nuclear power stations as his orienting features.

On a nearby work table is a comparable project, just completed: a beautiful map of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, 500 years after it was first conceived, with all the imagined history since inked in. In Walter’s version the passage of time has not been kind to the original communalist paradise. A capitalist revolution has occurred in about 1900 and the resultant island state is now an edgy holiday destination, a “leisure island”: “There is a mass tourist part, here,” he says, talking me through it, “a sunset coast, the Costa Del University of the Third Age. This is where the proletariat still live. There are some Utope separatists. MoD lands, inevitably. A surfing spot. It has all become ghettoised, branded, a land grab, basically…”

Walter, 39, grew up in New Barnet. His father was a policeman, his mother an émigré German originally from the Black Forest region. Barnet is the northernmost suburb – or coastal town – of his original London Island. “If you went to the end of my road you could see the woods on the edge of the city,” he says of his childhood home. He has, as a result, he suggests, always subsequently gravitated inwards to the urban centre, or outwards in search of wilderness.

As a student his art was quite expansive, gestural; he was drawn to search out little utopias, haunted forests.

He had the idea that immersing himself in them might put a bit of “William Blake magic back into a society that has become very formulaic – anyway, that was the idea.”

At the end of one day at the Royal College of Art working on screen prints, he watched as the technician who had been helping him collected the excess ink that had been used and poured it into great big containers. Walter asked him what he was doing. When the technician explained that the waste ink was collected in lorries and taken to a toxic waste site, it got him thinking.

“I am a consumer of the world’s resources as much as anyone else,” he says now, “I don’t claim any virtue or anything, but on the other hand I do think trees are sacred things. It did hit me that in trying to capture that fact, one of the main things I was actually creating was this toxic waste…”

One response to that was for Walter to embark on a drawing that wasted nothing, and “literally took me two years”. It was a multilayered pencil street map, one sheet on top of the other, of places that were important to him. “The only environmental damage in that was to my hand and elbow and my time and my eyes,” he says. That was the beginning of his “slavish” current methods, building up sign and symbol over hours and weeks and months.

It is tempting, Walter suggests, as the scope of his work has increased, and prints of his maps have become coveted, to employ assistants to help in some of it. He tries to resist that impulse. “I go into art shows and see these vast works that other people have made for the artist,” he says. “With my subject matter, though, it is all about human residues and traces that have often taken a long time to come about and settle in the geography, so I think you have to do that process justice in your own methods somehow.”

Walter, as a child, always loved that leap you have to make from looking at maps to imagining what the landscape they represented was like. He would pore over Tolkien’s Mordor. He starts working on a new map now as he might begin plotting a novel: going through audio archives, reading books, interviewing people – and of course poking around in corners of the city. He has, in the past, done work towards comparable maps of Liverpool and Manchester and Berlin, but it is to London he has returned, partly because it is home, and partly because it understands itself through his kind of accreted historical layering.

As well as elevating the handmade, the maps are a melting pot of all those stories, the theatre of them. “Some stories stick to places,” Walter says. “In the etymology of place names you are probably going back thousands of years, way past written history.” Those places still in Walter’s imagination retain traces of their original meaning – the comforts of Homeystead (Hampstead), the pagan origins of rough and ready Seven Sisters. That is why, he suggests, something like the Olympic park seems so alien. “It is a very broad eraser through what was there before.”

When Walter’s Island was displayed alongside the early hand-drawn maps of London at the memorable British Library show Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art of 2010 it became clear that any map is, as he says, “always a projection of the views and opinions of its maker”.

Some of his own projection is quietly comic, the obsessive city dweller’s mind map. But it is, also, an act of reclamation, reminding us that the built space is ours to live within, refusing the A-Z of ownership and statute, and reaffirming the thing that really binds the city: the stories all of its citizens share in their heads.

I wonder at one point if Walter has any interest in ley lines and those who would divine in London a new Jerusalem.

He laughs. “I don’t buy geomancy,” he says. “I am much more interested in Alfred Watkins, who wrote The Old Straight Track in 1925. The ley lines were the most direct routes for getting from A to B to trade or whatever. That history has enough magic for me. I don’t need dowsers to find that past wonderful.”

Stephen Walter’s The Island: London Mapped is published by Prestel at £22.50. To order a copy for £18, click here