Renamed City | 2022

Three current, interconnecting series’ of work - “Visual Archaeology”, “Renamed City” and “Urban Fables” - examine and reflect the changing urban inner-city environment. These disruptive landscapes are a kind of visual archaeology, an excavation of anthropology and cultural history from the cityscape. What will “city centres” be? Mausoleums to bricks and mortar retail; cathedrals to our fetishisation of the purchase of takeaway coffee.


I live in Bristol, a city that has recently found itself at the centre of current events: statues torn down, spaces reclaimed, history rewritten by new voices - voices that didn’t get to write it the first time around. We are a Renamed City. And whilst it is true that every city is a composite of its layers, constantly over built and overwritten, language and nomenclature are important. Our history and the history of place lives on in names - of streets, buildings, districts - often far longer than in any other record. What happens when we erase all traces of history; what else might be lost?
- Mellony Taper, 2022