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Love Letters to the Buildings – exhibition now open across LCF sites

Love Letters to the Buildings - an illustration of Lime Grove's staircase.
  • Written byLondon College of Fashion
  • Published date 28 May 2023
Love Letters to the Buildings - an illustration of Lime Grove's staircase.
Love Letters to the Buildings - an illustration of Lime Grove's staircase.

From artist and curator Sal Pittman, Love Letters to the Buildings celebrates the history of London College of Fashion and bids farewell to some of LCF’s buildings ahead of our move to East Bank, London’s newest cultural quarter for innovation, creativity, and learning on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford.

An exhibition of site-responsive installations will take place across five buildings at LCF: Lime Grove, John Princes’ Street, Curtain Road, Golden Lane, and Mare Street. The installations transforms recycled materials and machinery into artworks, showcasing treasures from the College archives and presenting a new oral history of the buildings and the memories they hold. These installations reveal the College's origins as trade schools for London’s renowned garment industry, including Barrett Street, Shoreditch, Clapham, and Cordwainer's School.

This exhibition is a collaborative project led by Sal Pittman. It incorporates research conducted by students on the history of the buildings, sound design collaborations with Jonathon Baker (Klanghaus), site-responsive illustrations created by students, and donations of objects and materials from courses that are being cleared as the buildings are prepared for the move to East Bank, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, in autumn 2023. Sal also worked closely with materials from the College archives, remixing, manipulating, and re-imagining them into video works, large-scale installations of objects, and image interventions.

At the heart of the exhibition are the voices of staff, students, and alumni who participated in interviews, sharing their stories and recounting their memories and histories of the buildings. These accounts are presented as quotes, audio recordings on vintage telephones, and films spread across the buildings.

Sal Pittman is a Visual Artist, Curator, Designer and Tutor at LCF, working across film, photography, performance and installation. Sal is the co-founder of Klanghaus, an award-winning installation and theatre umbrella which creates musical and artistic interventions in buildings which uses evaporating cinematic narratives, analogue and digital light and sound, projected film, site-specific installation set pieces and promenade performance.

Sign up on Eventbrite to attend the 'Love Letters to the Buildings' free exhibition tours:
There is a line that starts at Lime Grove in the west and moves across the capital to the east of the city, LCF’s buildings. This exhibition is a psychological and emotive journey rooted in a search for history and memory. It is a chance for our communities to say goodbye to the buildings that have been our home and allude to the ghosts who have passed through their corridors before LCF’s move to East Bank, part of Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, in September 2023.

— Sal Pittman, Artist-Curator of Love Letters to the Buildings
Image of a wall display from Love Letters to the Building, showing historical images of the buildings.
Image of a wall display from Love Letters to the Building, showing historical images of the buildings.

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