I’m working on a new commission for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Trellis is a programme bringing together artists and researchers from UCL to create new public realm works to be shown for a short period in October 2019. Read a summary of the project below.

(Confusingly, the video above follows a different partnership, which wasn’t taken forward)

 

Dr. Tse-Hui Teh (Lecturer in Urban Design and Planning) and Dr. Lena Ciric (Senior Lecturer in Microbiology) are working with artist Amanda Lwin on a project that seeks to change people’s feelings about urine. As a society we’ve forgotten that urine is an incredible, free source of nitrogen – pee is regarded as a waste product and flushed down the drain, along with litres of drinking-quality water. Rather than consuming fossil fuels (in the production of ammonia) to fertilise our fields, while wasting both water and urine, the project proposes ways to celebrate urine as a useful, natural product linking our bodies to fertility, water infrastructure and the landscape.

The project involves the production of watering cans that double as (female) urinals which are, over the summer, distributed to allotment holders and community garden volunteers in the boroughs that surround the Olympic Park. In the autumn, the participants in the project gather at the Park to witness their vessels being festooned on a frame, which converts into a water fountain. A kind of temporary water fountain that disappears after two weeks, as the participants retrieve their vessels. The artwork becomes an ephemeral celebration of water, so essential to our cities yet so strangely invisible.

Read more