Lara Hanger

Artist Catalogue

Virtual Exhibition

Do you know me by the sound of my feet on concrete?

Walking through the city, I stopped, waiting for the red man to turn green. A lady saw me; she told me I was well behaved… I blushed. I thought to myself, do you know me by the sound of my feet on concrete?

Walking down Queen Victoria street, a piece of rubble announced itself to me as my foot struck it. It tumbled across and hit a pile of rubble and lay still. I picked it up. I thought to myself, Do you know me by the sound of my feet on concrete?

My work is about wire, is about rust. It is about concrete and rubble and where we meet the city through the rubble of an urban grid that is left behind. Do you know me by the sound of my feet on concrete? contemplates what it means to be human in spaces no longer capable of holding through objects that are carriers of a recent past, a contemporary moment, and a reflection upon the future. Objects that are “hard to negotiate within established cultural categories of waste and heritage, failure and progress. And have become matter out of place – and out of time.” (B, Olsen. 2014) (P, Pétursdóttir. 2014) My work asks to what extent do stranded and abandoned things allow for alternative and involuntary memories? And in what way do they expose meanings and genuinely thingly presences that perhaps are only possible to grasp second hand when no longer immersed in their withdrawn and useful reality?

“A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.” - Rebecca Solnit

Through the act of walking my work considers an involuntary and inevitable experience of living with a material past or heritage that is constantly accumulating around us.” (B, Olsen. 2014) (P, Pétursdóttir. 2014) I explore the city through walking; the language of the city. As I do this, moments of intimacy and care meet me along the way. I tread through the possibility that objects of a ruin landscape have as a means of memory recovery and as a way to contemplate loneliness, intimacy, care, connection and my personal internal and external navigation of the city. I found myself fumbling through a grid guided by a structure that leaves behind. The city didn’t sympathise with me; what did are the fragments of a city I found around me; The lonely city. These encounters with the disregarded within the city whisper to us a new way of processing where we find ourselves and how we find ourselves. It brings forth bigger and unprocessed feelings that speak towards humanness through listening to the thud of your feet against concrete and the wire at your fingertips. Making the inconspicuous wire a mode for emotional processes and understanding, I can be intimately in conversation with the wire just as the wire can be intimately in conversation with the rubble whist “seeing and acknowledging things also as they are or express themselves on encounter, and not merely as conventionally explained in hope that these objects and spaces will teach me something about what it means to be human in urban spaces.