Part of the London Festival of Architecture 1 June - 30 June 2019

The ‘Garden Cocoon Space’ for Southwark Cathedral’s herb garden is an art-installation created by artist Angela Wright which encloses objects that will facilitate discussion of the experience of memory. For the artist it will be a return to childhood when the garden shed housed a wind-up record player and in the distinctive smell of wood and sunshine where she shared special children's conversations. This memory prequels the ‘Cocoon’ which will be a safe enclosure excluding the surrounding busy city.

The ‘Cocoon’ will visually focus the centre of its tiny sunken garden and indeed its whole visible surroundings. It will be the only example of an otherwise completely unrepresented type of practical building, both in structural method and intentions: a primitively personal hand-built architecture.

Seen in its surrounding city context - improvised from branches and twigs and enclosing experiences of memory - it will uniquely differ from its whole location, saturated as that is with a multitude of structural types both mobile and static, symbolic and technical, vast like the Shard and minute as the details of old walls, objects of pure engineering and historicist essays like the cathedral's east-face ... an environment that displays nothing resembling this fascinatingly 'out-of-place' hand-crafted refuge.

For further information about the London Festival of Architecture please visit their website here

Regular visitors to the Cathedral will remember Angela’s work in wool both for the Lent art installation 2014 entitled 40 days and the Blessing of the Bells service in 2017 when the Southwark Cathedral bells rested on a ‘river of wool’ the length of the nave.  Please visit Angela's website here for further information.