London Borough of Barking and Dagenham
2015

Interpretation for art in the public realm cannot count on the select audience of a museum who all too often pays a high entrance fee only to engage with a work of art. In the public realm the audience consists in local residents, shopkeepers, office workers, school children and passers-by, who at best notice a newly installed sculpture or mural, but are unlikely to stop and contemplate. As such the function of interpretation is not merely to inform, but also to support the art in its appeal to the public. We therefore attempted to create an engaging piece of work on its own, which complements the individual works of art, yet does not compete with them. The work of art and the interpretation enter into a relation of symbiosis, where both work hard to reveal a fraction of the local history and social reality to an unintentional audience.