To come this far. To have left ...

‘To come this far. To have left ...’ is an installation work comprised of stencilled text applied the walls of an abandoned army bunker. Built into the White Cliffs of Dover, the bunker was used during WWII to triangulate light in order to find the range of approaching enemy aircraft. The material quality of the stencilled text - a subjective meditation on fear, death and change - mimics lettering used in the British Army, thereby referencing this aspect of the site’s history. Words are positioned in the space to create a circular syntax: a reader’s spatial practice of the poetic line thus enacts a circular loop, potentially endlessly, through the space. As one reads, one traverses a number of threshold spaces in the bunker such that the architecture functions along with the text to lead one into, through, before/beyond and, eventually, out of the poem and the site, where they would have come this far, only to have left ...