Terracotta & Iron casts, pencil drawing, charcoal rubbing, 2025
Repair is a meditation on the action of restoring and mending and its relationship with care.
Over the course of several months, Joshua has forged relationships with the people living in the Brunswick Centre to create a series of community-engaged responses to its long and complex history relating to repair and social care.
From totems using plant cuttings, terracotta and iron casts, thread and seeds through to reliefs of repaired concrete patches – Bilton’s works grapple with the tension between the architecture as a model of the ideals of the post war welfare state in contrast to the everyday reality of living within a ‘concrete organism’ that wants to leak, crack, stain, peel and mould.
Patrick Hodgkinson, the architect who designed the Brunswick had imagined ‘a village...overlooking nature...(a) green valley’1 but the trees and grasses he obtained planning consent for, were never planted. Green space, communal gardens, spaces of wellbeing, have been seen as additional, problematic even. Nature has been an afterthought within this architecture.
One of the first things Bilton noticed when he started his residency was the peeling bark of a eucalyptus tree on the second floor terrace, housed in what looks like a concrete pyramid with the top cut off. Eucalyptus trees shed their bark as a natural part of the tree’s growing process but it can also be a sign of illness. A ritual of peeling and mending, shedding and healing – too much or too little water, that perhaps echoes the physical and social skin of the architecture. Outside on the terrace you are invited to maypole around the Eucalyptus tree in a collective gesture of mending and repairing with others.
Stains of damp penetrate the walls of the Brunswick and patches of shaped concrete expose where a wall section has been removed to access a pipe and then refilled, leaving a trace of acts of repair. Through rubbings Bilton has captured the impressions left by these various acts of repair – engaging local residents in the process who often stopped to ask what he was doing. The drawings became markers of these conversations, capturing their thoughts on what repair means to them: ‘Repair means to me withdrawal, to escape and rest’, ‘Fix my window and the damp in my living room’, ‘Protection’, ‘Fragility’, ‘Community is tough’. Community is tough, captures wonderfully the spirit of Bilton’s residency: it’s both hard to create a sense of community but once established, it’s hardwearing and resilient.
As the Brunswick community plans now to lift sacks of earth and plant herbs and flowers on the open terrace, the sharing of works-in-progress in Repair encapsulate the challenges and strength of thinking together. Join us on the second floor terrace where you are invited to collectively bind around the Eucalyptus tree in a gesture of repairing and mending with others.
1. Clare Melhuish, The Life and Times of the Brunswick, Bloomsbury, 2006
Eucalyptus pods, thread, wood, reeds, 2025
Repair is a meditation on the action of restoring and mending and its relationship with care.
Over the course of several months, Joshua has forged relationships with the people living in the Brunswick Centre to create a series of community-engaged responses to its long and complex history relating to repair and social care.
From totems using plant cuttings, terracotta and iron casts, thread and seeds through to reliefs of repaired concrete patches – Bilton’s works grapple with the tension between the architecture as a model of the ideals of the post war welfare state in contrast to the everyday reality of living within a ‘concrete organism’ that wants to leak, crack, stain, peel and mould.
Patrick Hodgkinson, the architect who designed the Brunswick had imagined ‘a village...overlooking nature...(a) green valley’1 but the trees and grasses he obtained planning consent for, were never planted. Green space, communal gardens, spaces of wellbeing, have been seen as additional, problematic even. Nature has been an afterthought within this architecture.
One of the first things Bilton noticed when he started his residency was the peeling bark of a eucalyptus tree on the second floor terrace, housed in what looks like a concrete pyramid with the top cut off. Eucalyptus trees shed their bark as a natural part of the tree’s growing process but it can also be a sign of illness. A ritual of peeling and mending, shedding and healing – too much or too little water, that perhaps echoes the physical and social skin of the architecture. Outside on the terrace you are invited to maypole around the Eucalyptus tree in a collective gesture of mending and repairing with others.
Stains of damp penetrate the walls of the Brunswick and patches of shaped concrete expose where a wall section has been removed to access a pipe and then refilled, leaving a trace of acts of repair. Through rubbings Bilton has captured the impressions left by these various acts of repair – engaging local residents in the process who often stopped to ask what he was doing. The drawings became markers of these conversations, capturing their thoughts on what repair means to them: ‘Repair means to me withdrawal, to escape and rest’, ‘Fix my window and the damp in my living room’, ‘Protection’, ‘Fragility’, ‘Community is tough’. Community is tough, captures wonderfully the spirit of Bilton’s residency: it’s both hard to create a sense of community but once established, it’s hardwearing and resilient.
As the Brunswick community plans now to lift sacks of earth and plant herbs and flowers on the open terrace, the sharing of works-in-progress in Repair encapsulate the challenges and strength of thinking together. Join us on the second floor terrace where you are invited to collectively bind around the Eucalyptus tree in a gesture of repairing and mending with others.
1. Clare Melhuish, The Life and Times of the Brunswick, Bloomsbury, 2006
Dyed Calico, participatory binding of Eucalyptus tree, 2025
Repair is a meditation on the action of restoring and mending and its relationship with care.
Over the course of several months, Joshua has forged relationships with the people living in the Brunswick Centre to create a series of community-engaged responses to its long and complex history relating to repair and social care.
From totems using plant cuttings, terracotta and iron casts, thread and seeds through to reliefs of repaired concrete patches – Bilton’s works grapple with the tension between the architecture as a model of the ideals of the post war welfare state in contrast to the everyday reality of living within a ‘concrete organism’ that wants to leak, crack, stain, peel and mould.
Patrick Hodgkinson, the architect who designed the Brunswick had imagined ‘a village...overlooking nature...(a) green valley’1 but the trees and grasses he obtained planning consent for, were never planted. Green space, communal gardens, spaces of wellbeing, have been seen as additional, problematic even. Nature has been an afterthought within this architecture.
One of the first things Bilton noticed when he started his residency was the peeling bark of a eucalyptus tree on the second floor terrace, housed in what looks like a concrete pyramid with the top cut off. Eucalyptus trees shed their bark as a natural part of the tree’s growing process but it can also be a sign of illness. A ritual of peeling and mending, shedding and healing – too much or too little water, that perhaps echoes the physical and social skin of the architecture. Outside on the terrace you are invited to maypole around the Eucalyptus tree in a collective gesture of mending and repairing with others.
Stains of damp penetrate the walls of the Brunswick and patches of shaped concrete expose where a wall section has been removed to access a pipe and then refilled, leaving a trace of acts of repair. Through rubbings Bilton has captured the impressions left by these various acts of repair – engaging local residents in the process who often stopped to ask what he was doing. The drawings became markers of these conversations, capturing their thoughts on what repair means to them: ‘Repair means to me withdrawal, to escape and rest’, ‘Fix my window and the damp in my living room’, ‘Protection’, ‘Fragility’, ‘Community is tough’. Community is tough, captures wonderfully the spirit of Bilton’s residency: it’s both hard to create a sense of community but once established, it’s hardwearing and resilient.
As the Brunswick community plans now to lift sacks of earth and plant herbs and flowers on the open terrace, the sharing of works-in-progress in Repair encapsulate the challenges and strength of thinking together. Join us on the second floor terrace where you are invited to collectively bind around the Eucalyptus tree in a gesture of repairing and mending with others.
1. Clare Melhuish, The Life and Times of the Brunswick, Bloomsbury, 2006
Participatory workshop space, 3 chalk circles, offerings of repair, care, mending, 2025
Repair is a meditation on the action of restoring and mending and its relationship with care.
Over the course of several months, Joshua has forged relationships with the people living in the Brunswick Centre to create a series of community-engaged responses to its long and complex history relating to repair and social care.
From totems using plant cuttings, terracotta and iron casts, thread and seeds through to reliefs of repaired concrete patches – Bilton’s works grapple with the tension between the architecture as a model of the ideals of the post war welfare state in contrast to the everyday reality of living within a ‘concrete organism’ that wants to leak, crack, stain, peel and mould.
Patrick Hodgkinson, the architect who designed the Brunswick had imagined ‘a village...overlooking nature...(a) green valley’1 but the trees and grasses he obtained planning consent for, were never planted. Green space, communal gardens, spaces of wellbeing, have been seen as additional, problematic even. Nature has been an afterthought within this architecture.
One of the first things Bilton noticed when he started his residency was the peeling bark of a eucalyptus tree on the second floor terrace, housed in what looks like a concrete pyramid with the top cut off. Eucalyptus trees shed their bark as a natural part of the tree’s growing process but it can also be a sign of illness. A ritual of peeling and mending, shedding and healing – too much or too little water, that perhaps echoes the physical and social skin of the architecture. Outside on the terrace you are invited to maypole around the Eucalyptus tree in a collective gesture of mending and repairing with others.
Stains of damp penetrate the walls of the Brunswick and patches of shaped concrete expose where a wall section has been removed to access a pipe and then refilled, leaving a trace of acts of repair. Through rubbings Bilton has captured the impressions left by these various acts of repair – engaging local residents in the process who often stopped to ask what he was doing. The drawings became markers of these conversations, capturing their thoughts on what repair means to them: ‘Repair means to me withdrawal, to escape and rest’, ‘Fix my window and the damp in my living room’, ‘Protection’, ‘Fragility’, ‘Community is tough’. Community is tough, captures wonderfully the spirit of Bilton’s residency: it’s both hard to create a sense of community but once established, it’s hardwearing and resilient.
As the Brunswick community plans now to lift sacks of earth and plant herbs and flowers on the open terrace, the sharing of works-in-progress in Repair encapsulate the challenges and strength of thinking together. Join us on the second floor terrace where you are invited to collectively bind around the Eucalyptus tree in a gesture of repairing and mending with others.
1. Clare Melhuish, The Life and Times of the Brunswick, Bloomsbury, 2006
