Mapping London

Last year I was working on a project of Jack the Ripper but I didnt have the time to continue it and take it to the level I wanted, so I thought that I could re-visiting the theme of Jack the Ripper. I took a walk in Whitechapel where the murders took place, I did some sketches and took many pictures of the area. 

In my sketchbook I used old maps of London of the Ripper's time and new ones. I worked with layers and overlapped the old buildings with the new ones, I made a journey tracking down the clues that uncover the mystery of the Ripper.

I looked at things through a specific perspective, through the lens of a detective. As the story is fragmented and essentially unsolved or has various solutions the maps extend in different journeys and through different media and look destroyed or fragmented. 

                                                                                                           Clodagh Emoe (The Approach, 2006)

Influenced by Clodagh Emoe, I decided to make a board with Jack's letters. I used inks to give it a destroyed look. What if there was a hidden code behind his letters..? 

Invisible pathways. Only the shadows show what happened, Jack is invisible no one ever saw him, he never got caught. Etheral, transparent and non-existent.. The myth.

I burnt the foam as each time he committed a crime, his soul was burnt just a little bit more, bringing him closer to becoming a monster and losing his humanity. These "scars" were invisible as presumably in his everyday life, he was a person who nobody suspected of being the Ripper.