The Monument

A maquette showing the aproximate masses of the planned monument.

Immediately that it was known that the Queen and Prince Phillip intended to visit Crawley to mark the Towns anniversary it became clear that some form of commemoration should be planned to mark the occasion for future generations. Despite the obvious secrecy due to security fears, the council set in motion a selection procedure and sought funding for a project to commission a unique new feature for the town.

The chosen design was presented by Jane Sybilla Fordham and David Parfitt who proposed a work that sought to fix in a symbolic monument, this particular period in the life of Crawley, including its inhabitants as part of the larger British community.

The way they chose to do this was to seek a way of representing the current inhabitants of Crawley, amongst an object that somehow symbolises the nation in time. These two themes developed in parallel, while all the time considering the simplest, most direct ways of combining them.

The Object
Looking back, the earliest form of monument within the British Isles, standing stones, suggested the use of natural boulders. Glacial boulders from Scotland that have been shaped by thousands of years of movement. Smooth, rounded, almost living shapes that perhaps represent individual people, each one self contained but arranged as a group. Like a nest of huge eggs, a clutch, a family, looking forward.
Taking the locality into account it became obviously appropriate to surround the nest with newly planted trees. This nest of boulders, a community in the weald.

As successfully as these forms may, in basic simple terms, symbolise the town of Crawley as part of the substance of Britain, its individuals and its community, the work would still lack the spark that makes them specific to this particular moment and the actual living people that they are intended to commemorate.

To represent the actual people of crawley, each one in some way built into the monument,
we shifted our perspective to consider the individuals that make up the town and looked for something that everyone has, but something that also epitomises each persons individuality. Something that we could, in some way, develop to fit with the boulders.

The answer came in the form of autographs; on the face of it, an autograph is the mark of a person. As a signature it is evidence of the actual presence of a person, touching the paper at a moment in time. From an artistic point of view the autograph is also a mark, a design, a unique pattern, if you like, a drawn symbol of someones own sense of self.

Autographs provided the answer, an ideal starting point for developing a decorative design to cover the surface of the boulders with. Exploring the many ways that autographs could become the basis for recording this moment on the boulders we realised that we were once again following an ancient tradition, petraglyphs, inscriptions in stone. Our task then became clear to find a distinctive, original way to incorporate the autographs of the people of Crawley onto the boulders of the new monument.