My initial method of investigating the bouldering gym, EustonWall, took the form of observational poetic prose: trying to approach the space with as much of a clean-slate state of mind as I could muster (despite a priori familiarity with it). I have, in verse form, emulated Perec’s process of ‘Practical exercises’ in ‘Observ[ing] the [bouldering walls], from time to time, with some concern for system perhaps’ (1974). My method of written inquiry began with an initial visual impression of the routes on the walls altogether as a whole picture, then a look at individual components, then a deciphering of the system (how are the holds interacted with and how the holds and tags are ‘read’ by the climbers).
In progression to visually capturing essences of the space, I also ‘force[d myself] to see more flatly’ (Perec, 1974), filtering aspects of the bouldering routes on the walls. This included removal of colour by drawing the shapes around me in black ink on white paper. I also focused on colour and shape, painting the overlapping routes in watercolour. I modelled semblance of the three-dimensionality of the holds on a white wall with coloured felt on a white page.
The theme of gleaning, as in Agnes Varda’s ‘The Gleaners and I’ (2000), also fed into this process: as Varda collected footage of the gleaning process, I collected or gleaned typography from the space. As Varda used a handheld camera, so I used a handheld phone camera: the parallel being that the film in Varda’s case and photographs in mine were not made with high-end flashy technology. Varda’s work is not only about agricultural gleaning, but also about artistic gleaning, which I have applied in gleaning or sifting the scene before me to find visual clues and features. I actively looked for typographic elements and at shapes and colours, but the gleaning process also provided happy surprises: as Varda discovered and honed her search for heart-shaped potatoes, so I was able to refine my artistic gleaning to detect particular visual elements (shape, colour, texture, typography).