About this Event
For this week's 'Emerging Voices' programme, join theCOLAB with Jodie Carey and Candida Powell-Williams at RSA House for an evening of discussion around two monumental new commissions for the Artist’s Garden: ‘Earthen’ by Jodie Carey and ‘Auguries through the Mist’ by Candida Powell-Williams.
Both sculptors have responded to the garden in the creation of their vastly different works. ‘Auguries’ is a fully functioning fountain which subverts the garden’s architectural and by extension its philosophical structures to create a toppling, technicolour amalgamation of challenges to the perception of women and the hierarchies of rational thought and knowledge. Meanwhile, ‘Earthen’, a pair of monumental pots realised through the long and laborious process of earth-casting, stand as monuments to the female ‘weeders’ who worked on the palace gardens over which the Artist’s Garden lies, unnamed and barely paid and to all women whose labour continues to go unnoticed.
During the course of the evening, readings from the poetry of Alice Oswald relating to weeds, the garden and nature, performed by Hersha Verity provide an opportunity to consider the parallels between the structures of poetry and sculpture and their respective power to conjure thought, image and discussion.
This is the third in the series of The Artist’s Garden Annual Lectures in partnership with Royal Society of Arts, London; following Art in Public Space: the Commissioner, the Artist and the Gallery with theCOLAB, Virginia Overton and White Cube, 2025 and Transforming Public Space: Sculpturally with Holly Hendry, 2024.
About theCOLAB
theCOLAB is an independent, women-led collaborative laboratory and registered charity that unites people, land and art. We commission epic, life-affirming and career-defining sculptural works in undervalued and underused outdoor public spaces across the country from a coastal commissioning programme in Morecambe Bay to our exploratory drawing residency BODY and PLACE in the West of England. theCOLAB’s headline project, The Artist’s Garden, based on the roof terrace above Temple Tube Station in London is the world’s first and only sculpture garden dedicated to the work of women artists. It is a beacon for best practice in putting back into use neglected public space and a platform for achieving gender parity in outdoor public sculpture.
About The Artist’s Garden
The Artist's Garden has transformed a 1,400sqm hidden and neglected roof terrace above Temple tube station into a place for the public to experience large-scale artistic interventions by women artists through a vibrant programme of artist commissions, residencies in the Artist's Hut and an education programme for 13-16 year olds with Westminster’s City Lions. Situated next to Somerset House and accessible by steps from Temple Place it is only a 7-minute walk from RSA. It is open to the public all day every day for free from 8am until dusk.
About Jodie Carey’s Earthen
The Artist’s Garden Women’s Work Commission provides a significant opportunity for an artist to advance her work in the field of outdoor public sculpture. For the 2025 commission, Jodie Carey presents her first large scale, in the round, earth cast sculptures comprising a pair of immense vessels which emerge from the earth as both archive and monument. ‘Earthen’ evokes the earth as both material and metaphor, the work’s monumentality reclaiming space for the emergence and reappraisal of women’s narratives. It celebrates the unnamed and unremarked women ‘weeders’ who maintained palace gardens since the 1500s such as those of Arundel House, which lie under what is now The Artist’s Garden. Created through the physically demanding and ancient process of earth casting, the work bears traces of the land in which it was cast. Remnants of the soil, stones and plant roots are all absorbed during the making process along with imprints of the cloth the artist’s hand stitched around the form before it was buried. The use of textiles in ‘Earthen’ honours women who, since the beginning of time, have stitched, woven and resisted through making.
About Candida Powell William’s Auguries through the Mist
Auguries through the Mist is an ‘unruly’ fountain through which Candida Powell-Williams continues her exploration of the garden as a site for transformation and storytelling. Subverting the stability of classical fountain geometry, Auguries through the Mist balances on top of its chariot, processing symbolically towards a future in which empirical/scientific and esoteric/spiritual knowledge co-exist. The Augurs were the priests of the Graeco-Roman era who interpreted the will of the gods by observing natural phenomena, in particular the behaviour of birds and what was later understood to be migration. Ornamental and theatrical, sacred and profane, it teeters around expectations of what a fountain should be. Its globe is simultaneously the universe, a single drop of water magnified, a womb and a grotto, embedded with the monstrous splayed forms of our amphibious past. Above all, it is a Sisyphean ball embodying the relentless determination required of women to overcome obstacles and a joyful embrace of the absurdity that defines all of our existence.
About Alice Oswald
Alice Oswald studied Classics at Oxford and then trained as a gardener. Her mother, Mary Keen, was a well-known garden designer whose work influenced Oswald's childhood. Oswald worked in gardens for seven years before publishing her first book of poems, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, which won the Forward Prize in 1996. She was writer-in-residence at Dartington Hall from 1996-8 and there wrote her long poem Dart, which won the T.S. Eliot prize in 2002. She was the Oxford Professor of Poetry between 2019 and 2023.
Please contact Alice Walters [email protected] for more information.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The RSA, Durham Street Auditorium, London, United Kingdom
GBP 8.30 to GBP 22.38
