Childhood memories can be unreliable. The softness of a young mind, and its willingness to absorb the real and the imagined, the possible and the supernatural, can leave unsure memories as it hardens up and seeks to recall events of decades prior. Places, too, can hold such memories, acting as containers for actual and assumed pasts, becoming stage sets for the everyday dramas of existence as well as stories written into them that stick to their sense identity and meaning.

Danielle Dean is an artist based in Los Angeles – a place more than any other shaped around unreal narratives and assimilated stories – but grew up in the seemingly more humdrum and parochial setting of Hemel Hempstead. A New Town born from post-war utopian ideals that imagined a new future for society, architecture, health, and education, Hemel is one of many British New Towns considered as architectural artefact, often romantically or nostalgically in a time where housing and development has been handed by the state to the free market. However, it was (and still is) a place of habitation, residence, and the domestic drama of families, work, and recreation.




Dean has created a mixed-media installation titled This Could All Be Yours!, incorporating drawings and installation. At the centre of it all is a film, Hemel (2024), drawing from the artist’s own memories as a character in those domestic dramas of the place, but wraps these narratives around something more sci-fi and surreal: Quatermass II, a 1957 horror B-movie shot in the town. In that film, a toxic black slime slowly takes over the town and its residents’ minds, arriving from outer space, interjecting its alien otherness into the order, logic, rational urban order of the New Town environment.

Dean intersperses clips from Quatermass II with 16mm footage made with family members – as well as archive and news footage of the town – to create a story of place that floats between childhood memory and personal testimony, science fiction imaginaries, and documentary. Individually, none of these are reliable or real representations of place, and one may think that by combining three unreliable sources would only result in something further away from the source, but the role of an artist is to create new readings separate to existing analyses and readings.




There are racial and colonial overtones in the original film that Dean furthers in her re-imagination, ideas now compounded in the aftermath of Brexit. And other political and economic issues enter the non-conventional composition: an oil depot explosion in 2005 finds its way into the action, choreographed moments in Hemel’s landscapes compress together ideas of discovering and collecting objects descended from space with the repetitive motions of working within the service industries such towns were created to support, and schoolkids of today are filmed in a group discussion about the place and their experiences there.

The film is only one part of a spread out, immersive and playful amalgamation of memory, documentary, fiction, and artwork. Across the corridors and corners of Spike Island’s gallery spaces are a series of theatrical set pieces, some of which offer clues to the ingredients of the film, others which seem to open up new, untold narratives beyond. Three noticeboards act as a kind of mindmap between all the elements, there are posters for screenings of Quatermass II, local community notices, archive documents of Hemel before and after New Town redevelopment, an advert for African black soap, archive news cuttings from the Buncefield oil depot explosion, and real-estate adverts for modern-day service industry warehouses as well as detached homes from Hemel Hempstead’s early days. But there are also meta-mentions – a fictional job advert looking for meteor cultivators, and the film-participant call-out for Dean’s film looking for “locally based Amazon warehouse workers to participate in a creative short film.”




In front of it all is model of the town, stained with a vast black shadow. Props from Dean’s film and looping British Pathé news archive footage of the newly-completed New Town is built into the display. Elsewhere, drawings and other sculptural pieces are presented in other momentary installations that draw from Dean’s memories of Hemel’s spaces. Wall based watercolours, drawings, and silk works by Dean further fold together personal memory, sci-fi story, documentary of place, and archive of the town’s events. They are presented deadpan, some within a charity shop-like setting others within a greyed-out social club space. The film itself is presented within the main social club room replete with bunting, coasters, and spilt drinks (all the colour of the sci-fi sludge), a space that turns up for a scene in the film in a further moment of uncanny collapse.

There is no resolution to this story. Dean’s compression of narratives creates a place between fiction and archive, memory and news, but one with deliberate loose ends that ask more questions, a looseness that seems to play against the rational order and structural intent of the New Town itself. This perhaps speaks less to the architectural ambition of the place, the physical logic in the landscape and economic logic of postwar-to-neoliberal politics, and more to the way we inhabit these worlds. People, with their experiences, memories, dreams, traumas, fantasies, and imaginations create a place within the place, and Dean’s film, drawings, and installations are an attempt to document that human Hemel Hempstead existing somewhere within the already-well-documented physical New Town and science fiction imaginary.