Title: Sea Between Us
Exhibited at Deptford X Festival 2025
Year: 2025
Medium: Origami-inspired sculptural structure made from bamboo poles and donated textiles sourced from diverse communities across South East London
Dimensions: 4.8m (length) x 2.3m (height) x 2.4m (width)
Sea Between Us is a large-scale, site-responsive installation that reflects on the layered experiences of migration, memory, identity and collective resilience. Taking the symbolic form of a hand-built, origami-inspired boat, the sculpture speaks to journeys both physical and emotional. Boats often represent movement, vulnerability and transformation, and here the form becomes a vessel for stories and shared memory.
The structure is crafted from sustainable bamboo poles and richly textured fabrics donated by residents across South East London. These fabrics have been gathered from homes, wardrobes and market stalls, each one carrying deep cultural, personal or familial significance. Together, they create a living archive that speaks to the histories and lineages that make up the community. Stitched and stretched over a skeletal sail-like frame, the materials come together as a patchwork of belonging, care and resistance. The sculpture becomes more than a physical form. It becomes a space that holds and connects people through shared heritage and emotional truths.
Movement 2
An audio element runs through the work, composed of layered field recordings, water sounds captured in Lagos, Nigeria, and a haunting sample from Wade in the Water. This soundscape grounds the sculpture in both personal memory and ancestral echoes. It offers a reflective space to pause and feel, inviting viewers to consider what we carry when we move across borders, objects, languages, culture, stories and how we continue to root ourselves in unfamiliar places.
Sea Between Us aims to spark open conversations. It’s a visual and sonic gesture of connection and kinship across cultures. It honours the strength of everyday people whose lives continue to shape the multicultural heart of places like Deptford, Peckham and Lewisham.
By transforming everyday materials into a poetic and unfamiliar form, the work sits somewhere between sculpture, installation and collective portrait. At its core, it is an offering. A space for gathering. A space for storytelling. A quiet, powerful act of radical care.