Bridge: Richmond
Title: Architextures
Writer: Jo Aaron Lilford
Creative partner: Amanda Benstead
The artwork: Abstract textile celebration of the feature layers in the rock beneath the arches of Richmond Bridge. Paper straws and mixed textile threads. 40 x 40 x 5cm framed
The writing: A freeform poem reflecting upon a creature fossilised in the bridge’s Portland stone construction and visible beneath its arches.
ARCHITEXTURES
Jo Aaron Lilford
(228 million years ago)
Imagine, if you will,
Avoiding the thrill
Of consumption by pterodactyl
(Or some other prehistoric ill).
Your worm-time spent
Mud-writhing carefree in the Dorset sun…
Then, that’s it, it’s all now gone:
Set, inanimate, infinite
Layered in the warming clays of Portland Bay,
To rest and dream your forever dream,
Reminiscing on your life of prehistoric being:
Your next role as yet unforeseen…
A couple of thousand years just passed
The quarrymen sound the alarm and blast
Your tranquil existence into the past
For worm is now rock:
An undeniably hard place
Your role now takes a different pace.
Up. Up!
Your arse-end is hewn from your other
Two blocks, loaded on a solid ketch
And sailed up the Thames
To the Richmond stretch.
Worm: your first life’s come undone,
The lazing about is all but gone.
Who knew that on the day that you were hewn
You’d become part of this pontoon:
The famous Richmond Bridge Tontine Scheme.
A very different wormy dream.
A cross between gamble and mortality lottery,
It was an investment, spread among lots of you.
It raised the pennies to ditch the ferries
And build the bridge
To carry us all from here to there
To great fanfare: and thus in 1777
Our worm met his alternate heaven.
Set in the arch of Richmond Bridge,
Today his stony form surveys
The waters eddying through the days.
And journeys rumble overhead,
Our worm – although he is stone dead-
Provides a service to the masses
As millions of cars and big red buses
Chunter from St. Margaret’s to Richmond and beyond
Worm’s legacy, set in stone, lives on.