Artist Nick Sellek’s toy town vistas present scaled down versions of East End streets

'High Rise' by Nick Sellek

Model villages are popular, if slightly old-fashioned, attractions with their idyllic neat streets, perfectly proportioned church spires and dinky railway tracks, but would a scaled-down Hackney be equally as charming?

Presenting an urban twist to traditional toy town scenes, artist and model maker Nick Sellek has been busy reconstructing the streets of East London, where he lives and works, from photographs of disused council housing, abandoned garages and labyrinthine walkways.

The work forms the basis of his first solo gallery exhibition, ‘Reconstruction’, at the Darnley Gallery this month which is comprised of two overlapping concepts: ‘High Rise’ and ‘Contrived Structures’.

Sellek’s work is interdisciplinary. He explains: “If I was a photographer I would probably just go out and take the pictures, but because I’m a maker I have to go through these processes of taking the picture, playing around with it, printing it out and then reassembling it.”

The tiny models are then photographed and framed, enlarging their scale to form two-dimensional imaginary streetscapes.

The high-rise sequence of the exhibition offers an original take on the often-bemoaned growth of East London’s concrete jungle. Sellek’s distorted images emphasise the incongruity of urban architecture as new developments rub shoulders with abandoned car parks and ill-designed urban landscaping projects.

“My work is not really about the negative side of things. With the high rise work in particular I wanted to make it look like a landscape you would want to interact with.”

“I think model towns are so appealing because you can see them from a completely different angle, looking down you can see how everything is connected.”

The other part of the exhibition expresses Sellek’s fascination with the eccentricities of architectural components such as staircases, balconies and walkways that lead nowhere, that are simply “structures for the sake of structures”.

‘Reconstruction’ by Nick Sellek runs from 5 July until 11 July at Darnley Gallery, 1a Darnley Road, E9