01. Vanessa Da Silva

Muamba Grove, 0 Hue #1, 2019
Steel, fibreglass, resin, UV paint
177 x 255 x 85 cm 

Muamba Grove, 0 Hue #2, 2019
Steel, fibreglass, resin, UV paint
188 x 320 x 126 cm

Movement and the body lie at the centre of the Muamba Grove series and the sculptures are strongly linked with choreography and transformation. The series continues da Silva’s investigations of scale, colour and interactions between the human body, sculpture and nature. The artist identifies each of the sculptures as ‘unrooted bodies’, genderless, neither human nor part of nature but as hybrids that are in a constant state of flux, metamorphosing into something still unknown.

Da Silva's process often involves carving sculptures concurrently and reacting intuitively to the forms as she works into the surfaces of the materials. This process offers an indication of the inseparable link between the body and the sculpture - the artist's own body becomes entwined within the making of the forms. Da Silva's use of colour and carefully considered scale contributes to the sense of dynamic and fluid movement.

Location: St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate Churchyard, London EC2M 3TL

02. Richard Mackness

Temple, 2023
Glass reinforced concrete, Schlag gold leaf, automotive lacquer
260 x 160 x 135 cm

Temple first draws the eye with a lustrous blaze of gold leaf. It has the creased and folded form of a simple paper bag, yet at architectural scale. The humble carrier of a million shopping trips, with their hopes and dreams and practicalities, seen blowing around our city streets, here fixed in place like a monument.

Gold has strong associations of currency and trade - the City's day job - but the gilded surface also suggests a temple, shrine or votive object (it's untarnished nature seen as a reference to the enduring perfection of the divine).

In this object questions of belief and value weave with consumer culture and the human need to find meaning and to belong.

Location: Corner of Bishopsgate and Wormwood Street, London EC2M 3XD

03. Victor Lim Seaward

Nest Series, 2022
Enamel and epoxy resin on 3D printed PETG
Dimensions vary

Taking the form of imagined phantasmagorical fruits, these artworks by Victor Lim Seaward function simultaneously as aesthetic sculptures and functional bird nests. The nests are sculpted using digital software and fully 3D printed in a durable material called PETG, before being painted in enamel.

Conceived to attach to trees and blend in with the seasonal foliage, the sculptures have been designed in accordance with RSPB guidelines to ensure a safe and comfortable environment for nesting. The internal cavity is insulated to provide warmth during cold snaps, drainage holes have been incorporated in case of heavy rain, and sustainable coconut hemp is used as nesting material.

Location: Tree outside 99 Bishopsgate, London EC2M 3XD

04. Julian Opie

Launching September 2024

Charles. Jiown. Nethaneel. Elena. 2024
Concrete
264.4 x 194.8 x 80 cm each

'At a formal dinner in China I found myself looking at the amazing array of faces around the table and, on a whim asked them all to pose against the back wall of the dining room, including the waitress.

I found myself using a very reduced language to capture both the sameness and individuality of each face. I imposed a strict vertical symmetry (except for the hair) and transferred a set of around 20 marks from one face to the next making slight changes to match each sitter. The result seems to echo traditional portraiture, silhouette or cartoon likenesses and more brutal face recognition technology, emojis and commercial logos. In an attempt to distil these references, I chose to cast the portraits as if they were something like a public monument, a motorway crash barrier and maybe even a tomb stone.'

Julian Opie, 2024

Location: 100 Bishopsgate, London EC2M 1GT

05. Oliver Bragg

In Loving Memory, 2020
Seven etched brass plaques
100 x 50 cm

This project focuses on the everyman, the natural environment and memories to place and memory itself. A series of engraved brass bench plaques have been installed to existing benches around the City of London. The plaques have been created to mimic the plaques that often adorn benches to memorialise or pay homage to a specific person. These, however, are fabricated: in loving memory of a ‘made up’ person or place or abstract idea.

Some of them are optimistic for a better future others long for a forgotten past. Some are more fantastical, abstract and others are more direct and perturbing or prescient. Many rely on humour as a way of communicating the idea.

Locations

05a. Undershaft, EC3A 8AH (next to St Helen’s Church)
05b. Fen Court Garden, EC3M 5DL
05c. Plaza outside Fenchurch Street Station, EC3M 4AJ
05d. Aldgate Square, EC3N 1AF
05e. Mitre Square, EC3A 5DH
05f. Bury Court, EC3A 8EX

06. Ida Ekblad

BOOK OF BOREDOM, 2022
Hand-painted bronze cast
300 x 169 x 110 cm

A monumental, painted sculpture in bronze, Ida Ekblad’s BOOK OF BOREDOM, 2022, combines fragments from the artist’s own expressive paintings. Emblematic of her radical take on medium specificity, the work sees Ekblad bring disparate remainders of flat artworks stacked together in a gravity-defying, three-dimensional manner. Initially, Ekblad follows the same approach as her paintings: ‘cutting, uniting and assembling shapes and forms’, before hand painting onto bronze-cast structures as though they were canvases, defying the medium’s supposed demand for flatness. Conveying a rich sense of abundance and corporality, BOOK OF BOREDOM presents a vibrant composition filled with fragmented, angular patterns and shapes, merging elements of figuration and abstraction.

Location: Undershaft, Undershaft, EC2N 4AJ (In front of Crosby Square)

07. Hilary Jack

Launching September 2024

Deluge, 2022
Scrolling LED
Dimensions variable

Deluge consists of two LED text strips reminiscent of a scrolling newsreel.

The top line of the LED lists record breaking, hyperlocal and global flooding data from historic sources to the present day. The bottom line of the text, explores age-old biblical and folkloric flood narratives from ancient cultures and civilisations, including the iconic tale of Noah’s Ark.

Deluge focusses on the impact of global flooding in the context of the most defining issue of our age – the climate crisis. Its presence initiates meaningful conversations about global heating, end of days prophecy, belief and morality. Here in the City of London, Deluge throws a spotlight on surface water flooding and the link with the fossil fuel industry that lies at the heart of climate catastrophe.

Deluge was originally commissioned by Meadow Arts for Watermark, in Worcester.

Location: The Leadenhall Building, EC3V 4AB

08. Arturo Herrera

Untitled, 2022
Vinyl
Dimensions variable

Untitled reflects the dynamic movement of people using the space and the mechanic stairs. Both escalator designs energise the area under the stairs with an all-over composition that mimic the traffic and activity of this large urban space in the City of London.

Location: The Leadenhall Building, London EC3V 4AB

09. Seph Li

Everything Before, Everything After, 2023
Digital artwork created with custom software, lidar, touch screens

Dimensions variable

Everything Before, Everything After is a digital installation of a meandering river rendered in the Chinese ink painting style, which constantly shifts its path as it flows, marks time and leaves behind traces of the transitions.

Eternity and the feedback between nature and human interruption are the two key themes within the artwork. The version on display is a digital reconstruction of an original interactive piece, in which the digital river turns into an unpredictable recorded history of the artwork, previously set by interactive touches and brushstrokes made by visitors.

Everything Before, Everything After is on display July, August, September 2024 and February, March and May 2025.

Location: 120 Fenchurch Street, EC3M 5BA

10. Daniel Silver

Launching September 2024

Untitled, 2014
Bronze, Carrara marble
185 x 90 x 70 cm

This work is part of a series of sculptures called Rock Formations that are often composed of couplings or collages of stone and bronze heads placed directly on large pieces of Michelangelo marble. The marble was found by Silver in a stone yard in the Italian town Pietrasanta, choosing pieces that had been quarried many years ago and then seemingly forgotten and left to weather.

As physical objects they have a distinct attitude; a poise that somehow evokes the human body, perhaps the slope of a shoulder or the thrust of a torso. On top of these plinths/bodies rest heads which begin in the studio as interpretations of certain ancient faces, but through the artist’s handling of the original clay or stone they have evolved into objects displaying a physical precision and individuality that confronts the viewer on an almost emotional level.

Location: 40 Leadenhall, EC3A 3DH (Fenchurch Street)

11. Daniel Silver

Launching September 2024

Untitled, 2014
Carrara marble, concrete
222 x 80 x 65 cm

Untitled 2014 is from Daniel Silver’s monumental Rock Formations series. It is a semi-figurative interpretation of the human form, made simply from two roughly hewn pieces of marble which references the work of Brancusi.

The art of ancient Greece is particularly important in Silver’s practice and these works have evolved from the study of statues and busts of the ancient world. Such objects possess an intense clarity of purpose, a purpose largely lost to us but one which would have been instantly familiar to their contemporary audiences. Silver sees them now as the products of making and re-making; by the original artist, by the weathering of time and by their re-presentation as pieces of history. Silver’s sculptures call us to examine our own connection to the images of heroes, warriors and myths, and makes them recognizable once more.

Location: 40 Leadenhall, EC3A 3DH (Leadenhall Street)

12. Jesse Pollock

The Granary, 2021
Powder coated steel
353 x 275 x 265 cm

The Granary is a life-sized sculpture of a traditional English grain store. Still in use in countryside locations such as the artist’s hometown in Faversham, Kent, granaries are an archetypal structure of agrarian and pastoral life.

Towering at an unusual height, The Granary is finished in pearlescent candy orange, chosen to represent the desire to return to an idyllic, rose-tinted past. Despite its indulgence to this fantasy, The Granary is also a beaten, forced and frustrated product. It reflects a brutal reality of material hardship, discord, class division and racism, as well as the fear and uncertainty of what we have lost or stand to lose from crises affecting rural life today. The Granary speaks as much to a need to overcome these crises as it does to the vexed rhetoric that underpins established visions of the nation, its heritage and our place within it.

Location: Cunard Place, London EC3A 5AR

13. Maya Rose Edwards

Kissing Gate, 2023
Timber, iron fixings, public footpath sign
150cm x 150cm x variable

Kissing gates are iconic pieces of spatial punctuation throughout rural landscapes. Couples who pass through these gates traditionally exchange a kiss to mark their journey and that of those who came before them. The design of the kissing gate is unique as the mechanism itself is an intermediate space between entrance and exit. A hinged gate where the door never closes, enabling free thoroughfare for some and causing restriction for others.

Kissing Gate is an interactive installation to queer urban pedestrian experiences and invite romantic interactions between strangers. Never fully open or fully closed, Kissing Gate is an encounter with no right of way - a hyphen, not a period.

Previously exhibited between gallery spaces at the Royal Scottish Academy, New Contemporaries, Edinburgh 2023.

Location: Mitre Square, London EC3A 5DH

14. Samuel Ross

CAUCUS, 2023
Powder-coated stainless steel
92 x 360 x 116 cm

To project and endow the spirit, through revelation. To live through a plethora of human allegories bridging space, time and location. A matter beyond formality.

The nature of service is to determine and solicit the needs of the populous. A viewer transitions from the onlooker to the protagonist. Intimate engagements with functional sculptures.

Sitting, standing, leaning, lurching. Within public forums, the private, and most sacred of dwellings. Each contact with the material is a compounding of the senses.

Imbuing the senses.
Be it through temperature, colour or surface. A sense of what we are, and what we are not.
An affirmation of our connection to material, to location. To the inanimate and intangible qualities of the self and caucus.

Location: Mitre Square, EC3A 5DH

15. Arturo Herrera

Untitled, 2020
Vinyl
Dimensions variable

Untitled is based on a collage which is made to contrast with the severity of the granite surroundings of Creechurch Lane. Activating the façade with fragmented shapes and colour fields, including a Cezanne reference and dripping paint, create a complex stage curtain on the flat surface of the building. This juxtaposition encourages a dialogue between architecture and the visual image that is open to a variety of readings.

Location: 33 Creechurch Lane, London EC3A 5AY

16. Clare Burnett

Secret Sentinels, 2022
Recycled materials, eco-cement mixtures, fibreglass mesh, glass tiles, steel
Blue: 210 x 75 x 75cm
Pink: 230 x 115 x 115 cm
Green: 210 x 72 x 72 cm

Secret Sentinels is a family of sculptures made from found objects and materials and covered in glass tiles. The sculptures are inspired by how we balance privacy against convenience in relation to state and private surveillance. The protrusions from each piece gently reference the surrounding, ubiquitous cameras in the City security systems, doorbells, phones and computers. The sculptures are made from a mixture of discarded building materials and mass produced consumer items. They are covered with glass tiles and eco-grout, reflecting the light as well as withstanding sun, snow and rain.

The sculptures are made from start to finish by the artist - from the welded internal structure and CAD calculations, to building the forms, hand-attaching 25,000 tiles and mixing different colours of grout.

Location: 70 St Mary Axe, EC3A 8BE

18. Elisa Artesero

The Garden of Floating Words, 2017
Clear acrylic and blue neon glass
50 x 50 cm base x 200 cm

The Garden of Floating Words is a neon poem that appears to be floating in the darkness from within the foliage of the garden planter. During the daytime, the words are revealed to be on tall rectangular clear acrylic stands, their structure echoing the tall glass buildings surrounding the garden space, but at night the words alone become the main feature. Using neon, a light source traditionally associated with the city, Artesero creates something ephemeral to make a space for quiet contemplation within the busy complex.

The work was first commissioned by Canary Wharf Group for the Winter Lights Festival 2017. Following inclusion in the 9th Edition of Sculpture in the City (2019–2020), the artwork was pruchased and remains on permanent display.

Location: 70 St Mary Axe, London EC3A 8BE