21 March 2026
Subland (working title): alighted at Wood Green station and noticed, for the first time, an odd and artful decorative ventilation grill up high on the tiled platform wall close to the ceiling. It depicts an idyllic scene in a panoramic Art Deco style—what appears to be a deer seated under a shining sun, flanked on either side by a flying bird and three trees. Turns out it's a bronze that was designed by the artist Harold Stabler (1872-1945) in the early 1930s for the station's unveiling in 1932, which he made along with two others (same size/dimensions) that now reside at Turnpike Lane and Manor House stations. Apparently the designs were meant to allude to the history and daily life of each station's neighborhood, which is something to sit with given the current state of things in that part of the city (more on that later, have been thinking a lot about the street life where I live). But I was initially drawn to it for the strange effect of the serenity of its subject matter rendered in what is now, nearly a hundred years after its creation, almost a charcoal gray that floats on a mesh grid over the intense deep blackness of the vent's interior. There's one bit in particular that I've been working with, from the left half of it, where a bird's wing is clipped at the top by the boundary of the rectangle that frames the entire piece while its other wing is almost fused to a vertical line behind it. While in flight.