STORIES OF REGENT’S PARK ESTATE
A large-scale residents-and-artists collaboration project making positive change to the urban environment of Regent’s Park Estate.
The Story Trail Project is a celebration of the past, present and future of Regent’s Park Estate, promoting a sense of community, safety and connection.
Through 11 unique art installations, the Story Trail will take the community on a journey through the estate creating opportunities to shape, reconnect and look differently at the area.
Regent’s Roots 2023, photo credit: Zbigniew Kotkiewicz
Each of the artworks will be sited at locations across the estate selected by the community as ‘places of interest’ with stories, themes and heritage to celebrate or issues to be addressed.
The inspiration for the project is a 300-year-old Plane Tree that lives in Clarence Gardens: “If this Tree could speak imagine what stories it would tell!”
The Story Trail Project was first conceived during the pandemic between residents and Regent’s Park Community Champions, managed by Fitzrovia Youth in Action and created with and for the local community.
Following an open call for Artists in December 2023 we are delighted to introduce the artists who have been selected to create public art commissions for the Story Trail, read more about them below.
If you’d like to learn more about the project, including the background, the history and the sites, have a look at our Story Trail Sites page.
If you have any questions about the project, or are looking for ways to get involved, reach out to project producer, Sarah, on sarah@olddiorama.com.
THE ARTISTS
-
Alisa Ruzavina is a community & ecology-tending interdisciplinary artist and facilitator working across installation, textiles, ritual, and participatory art. Her curiosity lies in creating conversations and collective experiences in the public realm that playfully explore alternative forms of knowledge, opening possibilities for sustainable place-based ways of relating, making and being that bring urban audiences closer in communion with the land, the civic commons, and the surrounding them intercultural and interspecies communities.
-
Brendan Barry is a photographer, educator and camera builder whose creative photographic practice combines elements of construction, education, performance and participation. Fascinated by the mechanics of vision and the processes of analogue photography, his work is concerned with the transformation of different objects and environments into spaces capable of viewing and making a photographic image.
-
Clayground Collective – Duncan Hooson & Claire West work with clay and devise clay-based activities with strong visual impact, an element of performance and collective making, contributing to shared cultural memory. They believe that everyone, whatever their age or background, will gain something positive from an experience of clay, through getting their hands dirty, by making, playing and exploring the material’s creative potential.
-
Dustin Ericksen's art explores the boundaries of perception and how we think about our surroundings. Using sculpture, performances, and images, he captures these deep philosophical ideas. While he used to live on Regent’s Park Estate, he now works from a studio there. His art has been shown globally and is held in both public and private collections.
-
Haque Tan – Ling Tan & Usman Haque create unforgettable architecture, systems and experiences that get people working together, co-creating diverse shared futures. Our work transcends conventional boundaries, blending physical and digital, human and non-human, natural and artificial. With diverse backgrounds spanning multiple heritages and languages, we bring a unique approach to the design process, embracing the concept of the 'other': other ideas, other people, other genders, other cultures, other beings, other species.
-
Jack Wates is a London-based artist. His practice is formed around the production of spatial ‘moments’ with projects taking form across a variety of disciplines from public realm art projects and multi-sensory installations to ‘performative’ sculpture and the production of images.
-
Shiraaz Ali is a visual artist and architectural designer focusing on making more joyful communities with safer streets. Mother Nature inspires her and aims to bring plants and wildlife into my designs to impact our health and well-being positively. Her work process is rooted in a simple admiration for nature; from the cells that form our physical bodies to the sacred geometry guiding our solar system and universe. The intention through all her mediums of work is to capture fleeting, intangible and metaphysical moments and suspend them in time.
-
Ocean Chillingworth makes performance work, installations and text. Their work is playful, low-key and interventionist and elevates the everyday, while remaining accessible. The things they make frequently play with language, duration, mischief and confusion.
-
Rafal Zajko is a Polish artist working and in living in London. His work deals with issues around industrialisation and technological progress, often exploring their environmental impact. His sculptural practice incorporates diverse materials and processes including ceramics, kinetics, prosthetics, and performance as a means to examine folklore, science fiction and queer technoscience.
-
YARA + DAVINA are a British social practice duo, who make ambitious, playful, interactive public artworks that respond to site, context and audience. Unfailingly inventive, their participatory artworks are rooted within the every day, using formats from popular culture; such as mini golf to jokes, to explore issues that touch on the human condition.
In response to artists Haque Tan’s installation ‘More Than Human’, local resident Ayamakhan was inspired by the idea of talking to the old tree and created a unique sound piece ‘Soliloquy For A Plane Tree’.
”I have thought how to create a piece of music that embodies or evokes somehow the sense or feeling of a tree. I often use simulation of wind to generate notes in my music, then quantise that into the modes I like. Thus, many branches of sound from a single trunk.”
SRPE is a Community Champions Regent’s Park project, produced by ODAC in partnership with Camden Council Parks and Open Spaces, Fitzrovia Youth in Action and University of the Arts Central Saint Martins through T-Factor. The project is funded by HS2 via Camden Council and EU Horizon 2020 Research & Innovation Programme.