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Fragmented Follies

Public art · Battersea Park, London

Sculptures that can be sat on, picnicked at and used in other ways, made with Year 9 students from Burntwood School. Their forms draw on Battersea Park’s buildings, objects and histories. Installed on the Pump House Gallery terrace, they connect the gallery to the social life of the park.

Fragmented Follies on the Pump House Gallery terrace

Fragmented Follies

The commission from Pump House Gallery and the Royal College of Art’s Curating Contemporary Art programme produced objects that sit between furniture, landscape and sculpture.

Photograph © Thierry Bal

The sculptural seats and tables arranged across the terrace

A park in fragments

References include Battersea Power Station’s chimneys, a Barbara Hepworth sculpture, Festival of Britain structures and Gothic monuments—even the sole of a lost Wellington boot.

Photograph © Thierry Bal

Close view of the white sculptural furniture outside the gallery

Use completes the work

The objects combine these references in unfamiliar ways. They invite people to discover uses for their forms rather than follow one fixed instruction.

Photograph © Thierry Bal

Small white models developed from shapes found in Battersea Park

Collecting shapes

Students first photographed elements of the park that interested them. Shapes drawn from those images became a set of model-making parts.

Photograph © Keying Chen

Students assemble models at a workshop table

Making together

In a second workshop, students assembled the parts into new models. These experiments became the reference points for the final sculptures.

Photograph © Keying Chen

For exhibitions, acquisitions and commissions: [email protected].

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Selected works

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About Sam Jacob

Sam Jacob makes work that explores the strange lives of familiar things. His work draws on the images, objects and fragments of history through which we construct ideas of nature, culture and ourselves.

Across drawings, objects, installations and curatorial projects, he examines how architecture and material things embody social and cultural ideas, how ‘fictions’ become ‘real’, how ideas become things, and how things become ideas.

Collage, copying and processes of reconstruction are central to this practice, which also moves between digital processes and physical materiality. These transformations and translations bring both humour and unease to questions of memory, value and meaning.

Solo exhibitions include Against Nature (2023) and Empire of Ice Cream (2019) at Betts Project, London, and Disappear Here at the RIBA Architecture Gallery (2018). His work has also been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the V&A, MAK Vienna, the National Museum in Oslo, the Graham Foundation in Chicago and Secession, Vienna, and at Manifesta and the Venice and Chicago architecture biennials.

Curatorial projects include A Clockwork Jerusalem, co-curated with Wouter Vanstiphout for the British Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale; The Lie of the Land at MK Gallery; and Pattern as Politics, with Priya Khanchandani, at the 2019 Lisbon Architecture Triennale.

Jacob is a columnist for ArtReview, writes Strangeharvest, and is the author of Make It Real: Architecture as Enactment. He is Professor and Dean of the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Die Angewandte), and directs Sam Jacob Studio, a collaborative architecture and design practice.

For exhibitions, gallery enquiries, acquisitions and commissions, contact [email protected].