Friends of Kenwood: Curator's Tour of The Artist's Garden sculpture

In 2021 the Artist’s Garden transformed a 1400sqm hidden and neglected roof terrace above Temple Tube station into a place for the public to experience large-scale life affirming artistic interventions by women artists.

Alongside the site-wide commissions, the 'Women's Work’ programme creates opportunities for artists to gain experience of the complex processes of realising outdoor sculpture in public space and to spend time in the Artist's Hut drawing and thinking. Visitors are invited to make and talk with every artist in residence. The Artist's Garden invites the winner of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park/ Royal College of Art Graduate Sculpture Award every year to make work for the garden including Abigail Norris and Camilla Bliss. Other invited artists include Holly Stevenson.

The Artist's Garden opened in 2021 with Lakwena's technicolour vision of Paradise ‘Back in the Air: A Meditation on Higher Ground’. In 2022, it took visitors ‘Through the Cosmic Allotment’ by Heywood & Condie to celebrate our ability to find spiritual and psychic affinity with the non-human world. In 2023, Holly Hendry’s first public commission in London and her most expansive to date, Slackwater, weaves together the watery history of its riverside location, with references to the abstract rhythms of the Thames and liquid movements within the human body.

The roof terrace is part of the Victoria Embankment, a bold reclamation of land beside the Thames conceived and built by Sir Joseph Bazalgette between 1865–1870 to resolve the ‘Great Stink’. This feat of Victorian engineering turned muddy foreshores into public spaces, with roads and walkways overhead, and tunnels for trains, water and waste beneath. Also thought to be on the site of the seventeenth century garden of Lord and Lady Arundel, who together collected England’s first great classical sculpture collection. Visitors would have alighted from the Thames and walked through the garden to Arundel House, situated next to Somerset House and the other great palaces of the Strand.

The Artist's Garden above Temple Tube station

ALSO ON SALE, VISIT TO THE ANISH KAPOOR EXHIBITION AT HAYWARD GALLERY ON 25 SEPT. DETAILS HERE.