Elise Else
Memory FoamThe Sculpture
The Drawings
About the Artist
History of the Site

The area around Liverpool Street has been shaped by successive communities, each leaving a cultural imprint through its people, trades and traditions. The sculpture, Memory Foam, describes this complex history, bringing together themes that have shaped its rich, cultural topography. Its forms build a visual connection with the Spitalfields Roundels, created by artist Keith Bowler in the 1990s, to commemorate the area’s fascinatingly diverse heritage. Sadly, some of these original, symbolic Roundels have been lost, and with them the diverse histories they evoked.  

Memory Foam seeks to recover those stories through a series of sculptural motifs: a globe evokes the continuous movement and migration of the area; a hand speaks of the collective imagination and industry that built the city, while recalling the hand symbolism of Spitalfields’ Bengali community. A wheel evokes seventeenth-century Huguenot silk craft, intertwined with London traffic; a coil, the seamen who traditionally settled here; a braided form is inspired by the bread of nineteenth-century Jewish soup kitchens. An arrow from Henry VIII’s famous artillery ground points towards a bone, evocative of the skeletal remains of Roman, Plague and Bedlam burial grounds. A coin recalls Petticoat Lane Market, as well as the many banks and City traders of the area; a sandwich, the rush of commuters through Liverpool Street Station.

The forms rise from a sculptural bedrock of shifting ground on legs extending in all directions like railway tracks. Beneath them, hundreds of tiny handmade shapes are simultaneously suggestive of railway gravel, geological matter and urban litter, mixed and overlaid, just like the layers of urban life itself.

Map of the Spitalfield Roundels by Keith Bowler

1. Shuttle and Bobbins: Folgate Street
2. Merry-Go-Round: 32 Elder Street 
3. Keys and Doorbells: The Cloisters, 145 Commercial Street 
4. Match Girls: Christ Church Hall, Hanbury Street
5. Violin and Bow: 6 Princelet Street 
6. Hoop, Top and Marbles: Puma Court
7. Apples and Pears: Spitalfields Market, Brushfield Street
8. Arrows and Target: Artillery Passage
9. Ship and Porthole: Artillery Passage 10. Purse and Coins: Petticoat Lane – corner of Wentworth Street 
11. Silk Design: Tenter Ground
12. Bread, Soup and Salt: Brune Street Soup Kitchen
13. Ship in Bottle: Dino's Cafe, Commercial Street14. Silk Design: Fournier Street
15. Spices: Whitechapel Road – junction Osborn Street16. Decorated Hand: Brick Lane near Brick Lane Arch
17. Book, Children and Pencils: Brick Lane – Christ Church School
18. World Map: Brick Lane – outside The Great Mosque
19. Scissors and Buttons: Brick Lane – opposite Princelet Street 
20. Four Tankards: Brick Lane – outside Brewery courtyard 
21. Scissors and Buttons: Brick Lane – opposite Beigel shop

Indicates lost Roundel

Map © Keith Bowler

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