Brompton Road, 2025
In Brompton Road, Chester Hubble continues his quest to interrogate the porous boundary between corporeal fragility and urban indifference. Operating at the volatile intersection of land art, performance, and what he terms “auditory extremity,” Hubble offers not merely a body of work, but a body in work—plunged blindfolded into the arterial chaos of metropolitan life.
Each work emerges not from an intention, but a collision. Daily acts of perambulation—undertaken in a self-imposed state of visual deprivation and accompanied by esoteric heavy metal podcasts—are ritualised into what Hubble refers to as “memories of trauma and transcendence.” Only upon impact—be it with a bollard, a sandwich board, or the bonnet of a Lamborghini Aventador—does Hubble temporarily remove his blindfold, not to see, but to record. The result is a litany of encounters scrawled with forensic immediacy onto linen: “bicycle courier (rather agitated),” “warm dog,” “lightly bloodied scaffold pole (my blood).” These lists, staccato and spare, become textual reliquaries of embodied navigation, each one a whispered prayer to chance and damaged cartilage.
There is, in Hubble’s praxis, an almost monastic devotion to futility. “To be struck down is not failure,” he noted in a recent podcast appearance. “It is interruption. And interruption is a form of punctuation.” This tension—between the will to proceed and the inevitability of being halted—is central to the work’s power. In re-performing failed crossings, Hubble creates a recursive choreography of repetition and risk, confronting mortality not as a thematic gesture, but as a statistical likelihood.
To encounter Brompton Road is to be implicated in a larger topology of absurd devotion. It is not just the map that matters, but the bruises accrued along its path. And if art is, as Hubble suggests, “a way of making the invisible visible,” then this series may be his most visible work yet.
