Restricted Access
Blueprint and plaster works, 2024–2025
What happens when a document is designed to communicate but parts of it are forbidden? Working with 1940s Ministry of Defence blueprints from the dockyard archives, this series explores restriction, censorship, and the act of concealment as a creative force.
By folding, crumpling, and covering these technical drawings in plaster, the blueprints are transformed from carriers of information into tactile, sculptural objects — their original purpose disrupted, new meanings surfacing through the damage.
Process
The blueprints arrived folded in the archives — large linen sheets carrying plans for buildings, machinery, and infrastructure, drawn in the distinctive blue-white tones of the cyanotype process. Because some information remains restricted, only certain plans were available. Rather than treating this as a limitation, the restriction itself became the subject.
Plaster was poured over the surfaces, filling the folds and creases, recording the physical memory of how the documents had been stored. When peeled away, the plaster carried reversed traces of the blueprint — ghost images of technical information, now illegible, sculptural, and strangely beautiful.
The act of covering became an act of revealing: what the plaster took away from the surface, it preserved in negative. These pieces ask who controls access to information, how restriction shapes what we can know about the past, and whether the act of concealment can itself produce something meaningful.
The blueprints began as instruments of military precision. Through this process, they became records of touch, time, and transformation.
“Pippa’s work transforms the bureaucratic into the poetic — revealing how the physical handling of documents carries its own kind of meaning.”