I have not carried a physical key in China for years. Access has become a phone, a code, a face, an app. The object disappears, but the bodily habit does not disappear so easily: the small pause at a door, the check before leaving, the feeling that something necessary is either in my pocket or not.
This process begins with a keyring I no longer use and an address I still cannot make quiet: Phipps House / White City Estate / Australia Road / London W12 7QF. It was the first house where I settled in London, my first home. At the time, the keys were heavy and irritating. I wanted them to mean more than they did.
The sound arrives before the object
Borrowed Key Study No. 2: A Key Without a Key is made from edited external CC0 recordings and composed silence. It is not my field recording. That distance is essential: these sounds return from another person’s keyring while my current everyday access has no physical key at all.
The study moves through a door system, a carried ring of keys, a drop, a return to the threshold, and a short absence. I am not using the sound as atmosphere for an object. The sound is the first object: a credential that keeps knocking against the body even after the credential itself has changed.
Listen to A Key Without a Key in the Lab.
An address becoming matter
Today I tested two visual languages that should not easily agree: a Western heraldic device and a jade pendant. One promises inheritance, authority, and the right to belong. The other can sit against the body, be touched, turned over, worn down, and read differently on each side.
The pendant format is the part I am keeping. One object, two faces, four fields on each side. The front can hold Phipps / House / White City / Estate. The reverse can hold Australia / Road / London / W12 7QF. I do not want to compress the whole address into a single flat surface. A place has a front and a reverse; entering it and locating it are not the same action.
Images that did not become designs
I generated visual propositions for a badge and a heraldic device. They helped me see the danger immediately: a convincing image can make the work look finished before it has been touched. I am keeping these pictures as evidence of that temptation, not as instructions for fabrication.
The useful question inside them is not “how can I make a believable family crest?” It is: what happens when a temporary address asks to be carried as if it were inherited authority? The image gives me scale, weight, symmetry, and a way to think about an access credential. It does not give me the object.
I will not design a font
I want the English address to acquire an inscriptional body without pretending that it has become Chinese. The next stage is physical. I will print the address once as an ordinary line and print it again as separate place units. Then I will cut it into word, letter, and stroke strips.
On paper, I will assemble one candidate mark at a time inside a square. I will photograph it before moving it. I will keep failures. The point is not to arrive quickly at an elegant sign; it is to let the address resist being made compact, official, or ornamental. Any final form has to come from the pressure of my own hands joining and refusing those fragments.
Research in view
These images are not a style board and not a family tree. They are the visual research currently beside the work: four museum objects that let me separate a real historical grammar from the object I am inventing. P00 is an artist-made claim to an address, not a recovered crest. J00 will begin as cut paper and only later become a material test; it is not jade and it does not borrow an existing inscription.
I have also kept Xu Bing’s An Introduction to Square Word Calligraphy nearby as a boundary, not a template: English can be made strange to itself, but the address in this work has to pass through my own cutting, joining, and misreading. It does not become Chinese; it remains an English address under pressure.
From address to object
Today the design decision became much smaller and more exact. I will print PHIPPS HOUSE / WHITE CITY ESTATE / AUSTRALIA ROAD / LONDON W12 7QF as ordinary Latin text, then again as separate place units. I will cut the second print into word, letter, and stroke strips, assemble candidates inside squares, photograph every arrangement before moving it, and keep at least one failure for each place unit.
The future pendant has two faces: Phipps / House / White City / Estate on the front and Australia / Road / London / W12 7QF on the reverse. This is not yet a final object or a typography system. The only design that now matters is the one made by hand from these strips.
The address is public work material here. I do not include a flat number, a door code, or any live credential. What I am trying to carry is not access itself, but the choreography of wanting access: the key sound, the pocket, the pause, the address, the invented claim to a place.
Process note, 27 July 2026.
