Women We Meet
RHONDA
WHITEHEAD Is very excited about the fact that she’s painting a tunnel.
Which
may possibly sound uninspiring. But give her another month and 26.year-old
Rhonda, the woman we meet this week, will undoubtedly prove otherwise.
The
tunnel in question was a depressing-looking entrance under Muswell Hill, used
mainly by children going to and from Muswell Hill Primary School.
Parents
had several times tried to get something done about it, with little success,
until one of them, a teacher at the teacher training college which is linked
with Hornsey College of Art and the Institute of Education, asked Haringey’s
borough engineer If the students could use it as a design project.
Enter
Rhonda, who lives with her architect husband In Birchington Road, Crouch End,
and who until last June was a student at the college doing a specialist
teaching course.
She
submitted four designs for the tunnel, one of which was chosen and is pictured
on the scale model she holds In our photograph, and the council agreed to pay
for the materials.
So,
first of all, Rhonda and friends scrubbed all the dirt and moss from the
outside walls and washed down the tunnel walls and ceiling.
Then
they started on the task of painting undercoat and white base coat Over the
entire surface, before Rhonda could be left in peace to put on the colour, a
job she thinks will take about a month.
The
Idea was to get people moving fairly quickly through the tunnel, so Rhonda
decided on the four strong colours of red, blue, green and yellow.
“I
tried to destroy the perspective of the tunnel,” she explained, “It’s
very long and boring, so if you
painted horizontal stripes It would make it worse. So there are bands of
colour to get a feeling of disorientation.”
“I
was very concerned with the Idea of space and tried not to approach it to the
sense of doing a painting. I am very……………….