Kensington + Chelsea Art Week (KCAW) is delighted to present its seventh annual Public Art Trail, on display throughout the summer. An unmissable highlight on London’s summer culture calendar, the Art Trail features world-class sculpture, installations, and murals throughout the borough inspired by this year’s curatorial theme Changing Landscapes.
Located across nine zones, the Art Trail takes up residence at some of West London’s most beautiful and iconic sites, including Duke of York Square, Sloane Street, Royal Avenue on the King’s Road, Earl’s Court, North Kensington, Holland Park, High Street Kensington, and Knightsbridge.
The 2024 Public Art Trail will be the largest to date, comprising of twenty-five sculptures from a host of esteemed artists with collaborations from The Serpentine Gallery, Grow to Know and award-winning public artists Gillie and Marc.
The final line-up for 2024 includes Yoni Alter, Gillie & Marc, Charlotte Colbert, Julian Wild, Matthias Neumann, Grow to Know, Simone Brewster, Annie Trevorah, Amy Jackson, Gus Farnes and Egor Zigura with further programme highlights including a festival in collaboration with charity partners Youth Action Alliance.
KCAW 2024 PUBLIC ART TRAIL HIGHLIGHTS
Set to become an Instagram highlight this summer, ‘Love Continuum’ by Yoni Alter is an interactive exclamation of the most important human emotion, Love. Yoni Alter has designed for Hermès and created installations in Shoreditch for 100 years of Graphic Design Exhibition, a twenty-five meters tall LED tree in Wembley, as well as the design of the Tate’s best-selling merchandise range amongst other highly successful branding campaigns. Yoni’s ‘Love Continuum’ will be located in Duke of York Square.
Award-winning filmmaker and multi-media artist Charlotte Colbert presents her alluring aluminium sculpture ‘Tutti Frutti’. The artwork draws inspiration from psychedelics, exploring their role in the pivotal evolutionary transition between the “animal state” and “human state”. Colbert has exhibited extensively including V&A, Frieze and Art Basel.
“Charlotte Colbert’s surreal and iconic work sits in the same psychic vein as Toomer, Dalí, and Breton,” – Phaidon
Find them all! Public sculpture artists and wildlife activists, Gillie and Marc, have created a ten-piece collection ‘Kids Go Wild’ – a sculpture trail especially for children, exhibited throughout Knightsbridge and the King’s Road. The collection highlights the importance of conservation, bringing viewers out of the city and into the wider world. Visitors can witness a hippo, Masai giraffe, African elephant, chimpanzee, Grevy’s zebra, Northern white rhino, lion, and mountain gorilla riding a tandem bike, a Dogman and Rhino playing chess and an Eastern Lowland Gorilla taking a snap of London’s landmarks, amongst many more endearing and fantastical scenes. With the world experiencing its 6th mass extinction Gillie and Marc hope to educate and remind us of the wonders of the natural world.
“Our unifying mission is to fill the world with inspiring public art that spreads messages of love, equality, conservation and hope.” – Gillie and Marc
Echoing the summer solstice and our ancient roots going back to the Stonehenge influences, ‘Stele’ by artist Gus Farnes, is a figurative sculpture created by assembling 3d scans of standing stones from ancient sites. Using 3d modelling software, Farnes has composed the sculpture by manipulating each scan, scaling and moving them into position before rendering the surface with Jesmonite and sand. Led by an interest in history, mythology and identity, Farnes sculpts using materials sampled from his local environment.
Grow to Know, the not-for-profit born through guerrilla gardening following the Grenfell Tower fire, first exhibited ‘Chelsea Flower Show’s Smallest Garden’ – Closing the Green Gap during the Chelsea Flower Show 2023. The display was hosted in the great pavilion and comprised of dandelion, Erigeron and chamomile – plants that would typically grow in the streets and parks of the local community. Grow to Know’s broader mission is to cultivate creative, cultural and community nature access and action to inspire change.
Closing the Green Gap is a campaign to tackle the growing divide and disparity in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, intended to highlight the reality of nature access beyond the gates of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Positioned in the UK’s most affluent borough, North Kensington is one of the most impacted communities by the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the cost of living crisis, the Grenfell Tower fire tragedy, and many other socio-environmental injustices. It is Grow to Know’s intention to widen nature access, artistically, to help solve societal and environmental challenges – locally, nationally and globally.
‘Living London’ by Amy Jackson & ‘STRIP-TOWER’ (2023) by Gerhard Richter 2024, Gerhard Richter, Prudence Cuming Associates
“Building the smallest ever Chelsea Flower Show garden to highlight inequality and lack of access to nature was to make a statement in the world renowned and high profile RHS Chelsea Flower Show. It’s important that bridges are built to support the most in need and we’re on a mission to close that gap to ensure that everyone has access to beautiful, healing, good quality, safe spaces.” – Tayshan Hayden-Smith, Founder and Creative Director of Grow to Know
KCAW alumna Amy Jackson returns to Art Week with ‘Living London’, a sacred geometric shape encased in seven different breeds of living moss. This impressive living installation will be exhibited in Sloane Square. The cultivation of the moss for the sculpture will take place in London providing multiple environmental benefits including cleaning air, improving water flow and promoting bee health throughout its creation.
“In a city where environmental concerns shadow necessities like food, water, and wellbeing, ’Living London’ becomes a beacon of hope and proof that art can be a potent force for positive change. The piece itself will help offset the footprint of its own and other public art pieces exhibited as part of the public art trail.” – Amy Jackson
Local artist Julian Wild’s self-supporting steel sculpture ‘Salvia Corrupted 2011-2020’ was created as a site-specific installation at The Chelsea Physic Garden, now reworked in a vibrant magenta it will be displayed in Kensington with the addition of mirror polished bronze elements referencing fungi that appear to have grown on the sculpture.
‘Spirit of Place’ by Simone Brewster is a joyful and vibrant installation of five large scale sculptural vessels made from Amorim cork, intended to capture the essence of the forest. Brewster’s extraordinary work was major highlight at the 2023 London Design Festival, and she has received rave reviews everywhere from The New York Times to Wallpaper* for her captivating sculptural pieces. This family of objects, ranging up to 2.5m, represents Amorim’s cork forest at Herdade de Rio Frio, Portugal. Inspired by this year’s curatorial theme, Changing Landscapes, ‘Spirit of Place’ represents the future of the cork oak forests, displaying four key traits: upright expression, drought resistance, regenerative growth and biodiversity conservation.
‘The aim is to reflect on the sustainability of cork, changing landscapes in terms of traditional uses as well as farming sustainably.’ – Simone Brewster
‘Tutti Frutti’ by Charlotte Colbert & ‘Kids Go Wild’ by Gillie & Marc
Artist and architect Matthias Neumann will exhibit his site responsive recyclable sculpture entitled ‘Xabana/2’ for KCAW, the first iteration of this sculpture was first commissioned for Capitale Italiana della Cultura – Bergamo Brescia 2023, creating a distinct formal constructive language, using untreated commercial wood slats and colour fields. The artist and architect will build the piece over two days, visitors will be able to observe while working to build this sculpture on site. The artwork will then be repurposed, thus leaving no trace and be fully recycled.
Ukrainian artist Egor Zigura’s ‘Thinking’ is a bronze sculpture developed in the artists postmodern vision taking inspiration from Classical Antiquity. Zigura combines canonical forms with contemporary notions highlighting current issues to do with identity, consumerism and ecological challenges. The sculpture reflects the theme of Changing Landscapes in reflecting a human face in a form of a leaf, where humanity and nature evolve into one another.
This year’s edition will introduce locally curated, collaborative projects within each Art Trail zone, celebrating their unique identities. These projects complement events hosted by local galleries and cultural organisations. The program will feature two Open Studio weekends at Empress Place and ACAVA (Association for Cultural Advancement through Visual Art), along with local trails, such as the Portobello Food and Art Trail led by artist Saira Jaimeson and the Frestonia Trail guided by Piers Thomson from Portobello Radio, exploring the area’s heritage as an independent state. In addition to this, KCAW’s official poetry partners local grassroots performing arts and heritage org. Kamitan Arts C.I.C have been reviewing the Poetry Corner submissions and will be hosting a series of Poetry Circles, including reviving their ’Poetry On The Steps’ pilot which debuted last year at Opera Holland Park with an array of inter-generational and multi-lingual local professional and community poets and musicians!
The popular Art Bus will return to the festival on 30 June, giving passengers the chance to preview the KCAW Art Trail via a double decker bus experience, with all artists in attendance. The tour, hosted by Portobello Radio, will include all twenty-five sculptures along the trail, ending at the Serpentine Gallery and Gerhard Richter’s acclaimed STRIP-TOWER.
This year, KCAW is delighted to announce its charity partner Youth Action Alliance, a youth-led organisation which focuses on supporting disadvantaged youth in Kensington and Chelsea through outreach, street-based youth work, and creative projects. The organisation has curated an exclusive festival, One Heart Community Festival, for this year’s edition taking place on the first weekend of Art Week on Saturday 22 June at Westway Sports centre.
The Art Trail is delivered in partnership with Kensington and Chelsea Council and supported by Cadogan, Art Week’s principal sponsor, along with The Knightsbridge BID, Opportunity Kensington and the Earls Court development Company. The Public Art Trail continues until August. Full details of the participating artists, their work and where to find it, will be available via the KCAW Digital Art Map. Details of all programming and information can be found online at www.kcaw.co.uk
