Entropic Geometry

All Images: West Leicester, February 2020

It's quite often been the case just lately, that I've set out with my camera, and a pretty circumscribed idea of the kind of subject I'm looking for.  Nine times out of ten, at the moment, that means documenting the progress and delicious Constructivist geometry at a selection of the significant construction sites currently transforming the urban landscape of Leicester.  The relentlessly sodden weather this winter has further narrowed my visual horizons - making me less likely to find subjects on a speculative derive, and more prone to heading straight to a proven hotspot on those rare weekend occasions when the clouds have parted for an hour or two.

But even within these pretty narrow constraints, there's still the opportunity for an occasional visual diversion, as these images suggest.  For a few moments, my lens panned away from the construction of new structures, to focus on a crumbling remnant of the kind of environment that that is generally erased by it.  There's still plenty of geometry here to seduce my formalist's eye, but the real theme is the way it interacts with the processes of entropy and history.  There are intriguing account of past activity and changing use to be found in those erasures and palimpsests, not to mention the glorious patina and organic patterns of a once-enclosed floor plane now returned to the outdoors.

As the yellow lines imposed on that ground indicate, all such tracts in a congested modern city must ultimately do duty as parking facilities.  In this case, though - even that seems to have occurred some time ago.  Either way, on an indolent Sunday afternoon - lost amidst a zone of massive local economic transformation, the real purpose of all these lines and edges is to delineate the miscellaneous evidence of time passing.