Fungus Press Residency: Flora Hunt – Sticky Dusty Car Park Witch

// At Sites Around Croydon; Turf Projects (Keeley Rd CR0 1TF), Wandle Park, Reeves Corner, Park Hill Park

This series of posters constructs a fantasy world where physical interactions with objects and sites around Croydon lead to supernatural, folkloric experiences. These works take the form of instructions, prompting ritualistic interactions with the surroundings of the work. They suggest a physical action, such as lying down in a car park or burying your feet in earth, and construct a narrative around the imagined outcome.

The texts were written after a walk around Croydon listening to music in the rain. They attempt to access the absurdity and melodrama of teenage angst, in order to address a desire for transformation through fantasy, and a search for intimacy – in this case through connection to land and public space.

The works humorously imagine a blurring of lines between the viewer and their environment, a seeping in to each other, a dust covered stickiness as you move through Croydon, leaving marks and being consumed. The texts reference existing geographies and histories of nearby sites and landmarks, such as the river Wandle, which runs beneath Croydon, combined with literary references and imagined pasts and futures.

The lettering on the posters appear as if constructed from scraps and traces of their environment, in pencil rubbings and bits of sludge from unknown sources, further blurring the boundary between fiction and reality, and between an inner, fantasy world and a physical embodied experience.