Work in Progress

Freya Gabie is undertaking a site history residency for 256 Grays Inn Road. Her research project Underflow explores the building's history, connecting it to its future.

Underflow

Freya’s research project, Underflow, plays with the idea of treating the Grays Inn Road site as a patient, finding the connections between the techniques used by neurologists and building constructors on site.

“Neurological research is a form of exploration: uncovering what is hidden beneath skin and bone. Both building constructors and neurologists use surface penetration techniques to produce images that share a striking correlation, re- establishing the connection between the body and landscape; our inner bloodstreams and the rivers around us.” 

"There is also an association of looking below the surface with time. The accrued layers of the site are a physical manifestation of it; from the deep time of geology to the human time of archaeology.  The site, much like ourselves, can be read as a palimpsest of different experiences. Neurological disease often tampers with this, targeting the hippocampus and impacting the ability to retrieve past memories or project into a speculative future, potentially marooning someone in just one stratum. Time can take many forms.

When the neurological centre is complete, it will be experienced in myriad ways by the building’s many visitors; a patient will feel it differently to a scientist working in the building.The final work will also not be static, but ever unfolding, revealing itself in new ways, so each encounter will be experienced afresh." 
Freya Gabie, Site Artist in Residence

Subterranean Rivers

Freya's research uses the historic subterranean River Fleet that flows under the site, along with the mythological underground river: the Lethe to highlight the new centre as a place for connection - a network of interdisciplinary research, empathy, democracy and collaboration, as well as to interrogate time, memory, transformation, renewal and exchange.

“These two rivers, one mythical, one physical have become the projects arteries; like blood streamsbeneath the skin, they feed a groundwork of ideas informing the creation of the work"
Freya Gabie, Artist in Residence

The River Fleet runs down the eastern corner of the site, fed by Bagnigge Well.  Its waters were discovered and found to have health-giving properties in 1760 by Dr John Bevis, a physician and astronomer, turning the site into one of the most popular health spas of the 18th century

Dr John Bevis  also created the Uranographia Britannica, Britain’s first star atlas
“It struck me that this man, so interested in what was beneath his feet, was also focusing up at the heavens, straining to 'see' into and past the surface of the sky, an ambition connected to the research due to take place on this site.”
Freya Gabie, Artist in Residence

Greek Mythology

In Greek mythology, another subterranean river: the Lethe, flows through the underworld Hades. People drink the Lethe’s waters to forget their previous selves. In classical Greek, the word Lethe translates as “concealment” and in modern Greek literally means "un-forgetfulness.”

"Greek Mythology was also where I found the earliest recorded description of dementia. In Homer’s The Odyssey, Odysseus's father Laertes is described as living his later years in the gardens of his home where he’d spent happy times as a child; the demise of his short-term memories taking him back to a child-like existence.

“Dementia bringing different, unknown, memories to light has been expressed copious times in conversations throughout the project, with people describing their loved ones as time machines allowing them to access pasts otherwise unknown to them. This idea resonated; evoking ideas of discovery and transformation.”
Freya Gabie, Artist in Residence

Mapping the Unknown

Exploring ways others have attempted to map the unknown, Freya’s research focuses on Greek mythology alongside historical depictions of the brain, including Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s drawings, which represent the nervous system in all its perplexity, while conjuring evocative imagery of geographical terrain.

Underflow

Freya is working on an immersive sound piece exploring the resonances of water; recalling the river and allowing each person experiencing the work to be audibly transported, journeying to another place. The hope is to create a piece to be situated in in the deepest part of the building, a space most physically connected to the subterranean river Fleet that runs its course through the centre’s site. Installed in close proximity to the health-giving spring that once fed Bagnigge Well, the work will seek to invoke and interrogate the idea of wells through history and mythology; their connection to transformation and health, to water that both sustains and renews. 

Furtive Ground

Freya’s research has seen her exploring the manifestation of time and histories held in the hidden layers beneath the surface of the Grays Inn Road site.

The top two metres below the surface,  in archaeological terms, represents approximately 2000 years of human existence, while the remaining 14 metres of excavation represents hundreds of thousands of years in geological time.

“This struck me in relation to the site, where sixteen meters below ground level needs to be removed to create the stable environs for the MRI scanners to be situated in the research centre”
Freya Gabie

Freya is working with ground material excavated from beneath the site, including samples from the each metre dug down, alongside the retrieval of three bore core samples of ground found at different depths beneath the site; London Clay Formation, underlaying the proposed basement, Lambeth Group below at 18 metres below and chalk, 35 metres below ground level. This material will be explored, with the help of archaeologists and geologists.

I hope through their insight and expertise, stories and histories will be uncovered from this archive of material and time, reaching from 35 meters below the floor of the building up to the surface.Freya Gabie, Artist in Residence