Painting as Poiesis: Encounters with the Merrion Centre

The familiar places we inhabit are overlooked ordinary localities, providing a backdrop to our daily lives, holding our memories, informing our identities and giving comfort by their continued presence. There are now growing concerns that these quotidian places are being overwritten by homogeneous “non-places” (Augé,2008, p.63). Recognising this issue, this study focuses on the Merrion Shopping Centre in Leeds, a pioneering 1960s Brutalist-inspired retail development which represented a new type of shopping experience in the UK. One of the Centres key innovations as a site of consumption, “designed for the efficient circulation of commodities” (Goss, 1993 cited in McDowell, 1997, p.266), was to incorporate a mix of shopping and entertainment facilities all on one site.

This study draws upon a breadth of theoretical and practical research in the fields of painting, photography, place, the everyday, the archive, memory and psychogeography. Its principal aim is to investigate in what ways painting practice, as part of a novel toolkit of research methods, might offer new understandings and an original contribution to knowledge of the complex spatiality of the Merrion Centre. To do this, the project uses paintings as a site of enquiry through which to interrogate the Centre as a place of history, individual and shared memory, retail fantasy, the uncanny and lived experience. Building on this research, the study then speculates on the potential for paintings from this investigation to advance from a metaphor or representation of place towards what Casey describes as the ‘re-implacement’ (2002, p.234) of original place.