pele’s gift: letters

this is the original gift in the letters line of gifts.

“this is a collection of 20 doodles. some of them took place whilst sitting at home, many of them on the tube to and from work recently.  all of them however, were created on my iphone using an application that allows you to ‘finger paint’ on the screen.  each letter is an individual piece and collectively, they spell out how i see this area: ‘whitechapel beautiful’. 

the backdrop of each letter reveals a mixture of whitechapel’s past and present and even some of my personal frustrations.  the letter ‘p’ for example is my experience of catching tubes from whitechapel station:  the district line and the frequency that they arrive at the stop is reflected by the weighting of the tube-line colour green. the hammersmith and city line and it’s frequency (or more precisely, its lack thereof) is etched in pink… guess which line i needed to get to work?!

some of the stories associated with each piece are more obvious than others. if we ever get to communicate in some shape or form, i can tell you the background to each piece. in the meantime, this is a doodle that became a photo that hopefully in your hands, will make its way on to a t-shirt and beyond.”

pele cortizo-burgess, november 2008