Did you know that the rooftop of Temple Station in London is home to the world’s first public sculpture garden dedicated to women artists? This month, it presents Mary, Mary, an outdoor art experience inspired by the 18th-century English nursery rhyme.
The half-acre sculpture garden overlooks the Thames and is located on what was once the 17th formal gardens of Lord and Lady Arundel, creators of England’s first classical sculpture garden collection. On these ‘lost’ grounds, the Artist’s Garden has taken root, with site-specific installations by women sculptors from the UK and beyond.
Mary, Mary takes the nursery rhyme as its curatorial starting point, reframing the negative characterisation of forceful women as ‘contrarians’. This dynamic extends to the urban garden, with artists invited to explore and subvert the history and architecture of the space to create a new sculptural language that reclaims it for the public
Auguries into the Mist, Candida Powell–Williams. Courtesy theCOLAB The Artist’s Garden. Photography © Nick Turpin.
Courtesy theCOLAB The Artist’s Garden. Photography © Nick Turpin.
MARY MARY theCOLABArtistsGarden. Courtesy theCOLAB The Artist’s Garden. Photography © Nick Turpin.
Savoy, Alice Wilson. Courtesy theCOLAB The Artist’s Garden. Photography © Nick Turpin.
Dancing In Time, LR Vandy. Courtesy theCOLAB The Artist’s Garden. Photography © Nick Turpin.
Auguries into the Mist, Candida Powell–Williams. Courtesy theCOLAB The Artist’s Garden. Photography © Nick Turpin.
Superhero Cog Woman, LR Vandy. Courtesy theCOLAB The Artist’s Garden. Photography © Nick Turpin.
Auguries into the Mist, Candida Powell–Williams. Courtesy theCOLAB The Artist’s Garden. Photography © Nick Turpin.
Untitled (chime for Caro), Virginia Overton. Courtesy theCOLAB The Artist’s Garden. Photography © Nick Turpin.
It’s All Kicking off, Lucy Gregory. Courtesy theCOLAB The Artist’s Garden. Photography © Nick Turpin.
The exhibition features commissioned works by Rong Bao, Candida Powell-Williams, and Alice Wilson and adapted works by Lucy Gregory and L R Vandy, plus existing pieces by Olivia Bax, Frances Richardson, Holly Stevenson, and Virginia Overton.
Rong Bao’s work, Yellow Path, draws on the tactile yellow paving slabs used to guide the visually impaired through London’s streets. The artwork contains a poem in Braille that is accessible to the visually impaired, often forgotten by urbanists and planners, inviting users to experience the sculpture through touch and voice.
Alice Wilson’s commission, Savoy (2024), is a vertical forest of 4-metre-tall construction timbers, each etched with a schematic drawing of a building or architectural element on its tip. The work abuts the existing Artist’s Hut, which has been wrapped in a monochromatic photograph of a Scottish forest, highlighting the relationship between raw material and the built environment.
Lucy Gregory’s kinetic sculpture, It’s All Kicking Off (2024), is a new reworking of her indoor piece Images Have Legs, where viewers are the engine that powers a perpetual ‘cancan’ motion. Subversive, humorous, and fun, the artwork expresses joy through movement. Similarly, Virginia Overton’s kinetic musical work, Untitled (Chime for Caro) (2022), produces ephemeral sounds harnessed from steel off-cuts and an aluminium pipe mounted on an A-frame gantry.
Inspired by classical garden design, Candida Powell-Williams subverts traditional fountain architecture by placing it on a moving chariot for her work, The Mist (2024). This piece calls for a balance between the mystical and the scientific, challenging us to ‘unlearn’ the myth of paradise.
While some works have been presented before, they have all been adapted and reshaped for the context of the Artist’s Garden, which was founded by theCOLAB in 2021. Mary, Mary is free to visit until September 2025.
