I noticed this unfinished monument in Bethnal Green, London, in the park next to the tube. It is awaiting funds for completion. It commemorates the 173 people who died in a crush of people entering the tube in 1943 to take shelter from German bombing.

It’s unfinishedness, with the front of the concrete pillar being muffled (muzzled) by a wooden box echoes the cover up of the incident during the war and in the intervening 60 odd years it has taken the local people to get something erected.

I noticed it because it reminded me of conversations I have had with Jo about her work. It also reminds me of ‘Peach’ by Jackson Sprague shown at Cole gallery East London in his solo show: A House the Size of A Head (2014). Something Pat posts (below) – about noticing not just with your eyes, but with your senses and your body. I often notice through my eyes as if they hurt with the feeling of something – its weight, touch, absence, tilt …. ‘Peach’ (below) has hanging ‘arms’, that are slightly prevented from hanging vertically by the based which just catches their ends and makes them bend.

Where does recognition come in the act of noticing? Do you only notice (rather than look at) something you recognise? You have noticed something because you have been stimulated by recognition. Do we fail to notice things that don’t relate to a set of already present (and waiting to be noticed) connections? What don’t we notice and why?

Yet anecdotally people often say they have started to notice something/s. Can noticing be encouraged/stimulated outside of our already present and waiting connections?