A Delicate Sense of Terror takes inspiration from the geometry inherent in the modernist architecture of Ernö Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower in East London. Through this ongoing and ever evolving project Harling deconstructs and dissects, through time and space, the spatial parameters that this monolithic tower has occupied since its first tenants arrived in 1968.
Following photographic deconstruction, Harling reconstructs geometric trajectories on lightboxes and in sculptural installations, exposing form and processing function, transgressing far beyond mere representation. Through this process he attempts to witness a truth about the transient community of the tower’s collective consciousness.
‘Order is resisted in this documentation of our tower’s architecture, a brutal towerwhich defies the chaos of the organisms that inhabit and attempt to control it. A flowing mechanism, its residents absent, displays only their shapings, negotiations, dressings and undressings of the barren interior. Hidden spaces of communal infrastructure become integral to the comprehensive record, echoing the way our routes into and out of our flats become integrated into our collective experience of home.
Harling captures our familiar surrounds in unfamiliar constellations of juxtaposed detail. Everyday environment breaks out of its routine and reveals new patterns of living. Decay evident in uncovered surfaces, married together in their deconstruction, become pieces to take away: renewal through rearrangement. A jigsaw of different viewpoints, of repeated viewpoints, emerges. These collective mutations comprise the architectural identity of all who reside in this last bastion of concrete: a proud structure bearing the weight of its own social expectation.’
