Elise Else
Memory FoamThe Sculpture
The Drawings
About the Artist
History of the Site

The area around Liverpool Street has been shaped by successive communities, each leaving a cultural imprint through its people, trades and traditions. The sculpture, Memory Foam, describes this complex history, bringing together themes that have shaped its rich, cultural topography. Its forms build a visual connection with the Spitalfields Roundels, created by artist Keith Bowler in the 1990s, to commemorate the area’s fascinatingly diverse heritage. Sadly, some of these original, symbolic Roundels have been lost, and with them the diverse histories they evoked.  

Memory Foam seeks to recover those stories through a series of sculptural motifs: a globe evokes the continuous movement and migration of the area; a hand speaks of the collective imagination and industry that built the city, while recalling the hand symbolism of Spitalfields’ Bengali community. A wheel evokes seventeenth-century Huguenot silk craft, intertwined with London traffic; a coil, the seamen who traditionally settled here; a braided form is inspired by the bread of nineteenth-century Jewish soup kitchens. An arrow from Henry VIII’s famous artillery ground points towards a bone, evocative of the skeletal remains of Roman, Plague and Bedlam burial grounds. A coin recalls Petticoat Lane Market, as well as the many banks and City traders of the area; a sandwich, the rush of commuters through Liverpool Street Station.

The forms rise from a sculptural bedrock of shifting ground on legs extending in all directions like railway tracks. Beneath them, hundreds of tiny handmade shapes are simultaneously suggestive of railway gravel, geological matter and urban litter, mixed and overlaid, just like the layers of urban life itself.

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