Top Buzzer, 1999, at the Bathhouse Centre of Contemporary Art in Gdansk brings together a series of paintings and an outdoor installation made during a 4 month residency at the Bathhouse.

On arriving in Gdansk I spoke no Polish and my knowledge of the town was limited. I requested that people constantly draw me maps to direct me to places relating to my practice: galleries, paint shops, sign writers, photographic centres. Verbal communication gave way to visual, and these maps, casually sketched onto the back of and old envelope or a beer mat, became the starting point of my own effort to map the terrain.

I proceeded by projecting a sketch and superimposed upon it a street plan of the same area onto a canvas and tracing them both. The sketches are positioned and scaled so that the point they locate and at least one other landmark correspond to their respective locations on the street plan.

The labyrinth is a single, spiraling path cut into a field of wheat which I have planted within the ruined walls of a granary building in the centre of Gdansk. In the autumn the grain will ripen and then whither and die.

In the works created during his residency at the Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art Nicholas Ferguson refers to that commonly accepted iconic representation which is the city map: the piece of paper we buy when we arrive in a strange city to attaint ourselves with its unknown spaces. We use it too, albeit not always with success, when we ask a passer by for directions and obtain various instructions. At other times we ask friends the way to places which interest us. During his three month stay, Ferguson collected sketched maps made for him by artist-friends from Gdansk. On analysing each of the sketches he found in them individual ways of understanding and describing urban space. Each friend found his or her own reference points. Each regarded different buildings, shops or architectural elements as important or characteristic. An additional aspect of these hurried notes is the fact that the artists brought to them ways of thinking about space peculiar to their artistic practice.

When laid onto real maps of the city drawn by cartographers these sketches reveal their inaccuracy but also their personal character derived from experience. A different, more individual picture of the city emerges, one which is not subject to cartographic convention but a combination of various personal and subjective methods and ways of reacting to what we call ‘‘the space of the city’s. It is a dialogue of many voices in which the city is not an entity in itself, objective and already defined, but a constantly changing configuration of various hypothetical cities, each of which has its own history its own space and its own narrator.

Aneta Szlak, Director The Bathhouse Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdansk, Poland

Translated into English by Tadeusz Z. Wolanski