Newly commissioned by theCOLAB The Artist’s Garden on the occasion of its ‘Taking Place: Women Artists in Public Spaces’ conference, this life sized, hand-sewn wearable sculpture becomes a walking performance starting from the Anatomy Lecture Theatre of King’s College London where anatomical dissections occurred. ‘Walking with Gray’ by Daisy Collingridge is an experimental work that explores and challenges how sculpture can be experienced and where, it invites us to consider the relationship between sculpture and landscape; anatomy and the human condition.  through anatomy and making.

Genderless, ‘Walking with Gray’ leads the crowd out of the university, onto the street and into the Artist’s Garden, the world’s only sculpture garden dedicated to the work of women artists.  It is an open invitation to the public to walk with sculpture in public space and, along the way, consider the nature of humanity and its artistic and anatomical interpretations.  

Collingridge grew up in a scientific family, surrounded by the pragmatic and detailed discussions of the internal workings of the human body. Meanwhile, she sewed and quilted and drew and made endless fabric forms, often in fleshy hues.  It was on discovering Andreas Vesalius’s seminal work on human anatomy, ‘De humani corporis fabrica’ (‘On the fabric of the human body’) that she reached a turning point. At the time it was published, in 1543, medical texts were small notebooks, based on the ancient and erroneous dissections of Aristotle and Galen.  Vesalius chose to dramatically increase the size of his publication to 55.8 x 37cm and enlisted artists to make woodcuts. They depicted Vesalius’s dissections, his peeling back of the body, layer by layer but unlike any other texts, the dissected bodies become humans standing, walking, thinking and adopting the poses of the life model, often within elaborate landscapes and interiors.  As Collingridge turned the 300 vast pages of this book in the Cadbury Research Library at Birmingham University,  she saw the worlds of anatomy and art converging.  She saw the humanity in the sinews and tubes and mechanics and embarked on sharing the meaning that resides in the ‘fabric of the human body’ through her work. 

‘Walking with Gray’ is life size and envelopes the body and head of the wearer, entirely masking the person within. It is a figurative sculpture, one that, unusually, walks and looks about, silently, proudly addressing what public sculpture is and could be, where it should be seen, how it should be experienced and by whom.  It addresses depictions of the female nude in public spaces and recalls that women artists were denied access to the life room to observe the naked female body or to attend anatomy drawing classes.  It does so cartoonishly, in soft fabric, in pastel hues, constantly morphing into its environment and into our imagination.  

‘Walking with Gray’ is the second in a series of walking sculptural performances commissioned by theCOLAB that began with ‘Walking with Clive’ a co-commission with Deco Publique which took place in the coastal landscape of Morecambe Bay in March 2025.  

About Daisy Collingridge

Collingridge’s works across sculpture, photography and performance exploring and celebrating humanity through the anatomical properties of the human form. Selected exhibitions and residencies: theCOLAB’s BODY and PLACE exploratory drawing residency and at The Bowes Museum, Textiel Museum, Tilberg, Netherlands in 2025; The Art Station, Saxmundham, UK, Performance as part of V&A Lates Feminist Futures programme, London in 2024; she exhibited at TJ Boulting, London and Subtitles Labs, LA in 2023. She was the 2020 – 22 Sarabande Foundation Artist in Resident, London and participated in the 2021 British Textile Biennial at The Whitaker.   She holds a BA in Fashion Design from Central St Martins, 2014, and the Foundation Diploma at Loughborough University, 2010.  She lives and works in Burbage, Leicestershire.  

Conference | Taking Place: Women Artists in Public Spaces

Taking Place: Women Artists in Public Spaces conference on 24 June 2025, presented at King's College London and convened by Dr Kate McMillan and Claire Mander, theCOLAB The Artist’s Garden. Join us for a collective and proactive rethinking of commissioning and the re-use of neglected public spaces to be more inclusive of women artists.  Bringing together art historians (Natalie Rudd), writers (The White Pube), commissioners (Claire Doherty/Situations and Bridget Sawyers/Tideway), local authorities (Westminster City Council), artists (including Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press RA) and institutions (Yorkshire Sculpture Park/National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington DC). 

theCOLAB commissioned three new site-responsive interventions on the occasion of the conference: Florence Peake’s performance lecture ‘Your meaning not your materiality (YMNYM)’ and Daisy Collingridge’s sculptural walking performance ‘Walking with Gray’ respond to the historic King’s College London’s Anatomy Lecture Theatre, where anatomical dissections took place until 1997.  Kate McMillan’s audio-visual and sculptural intervention ‘The River’s Stomach (Songs of Empire)’ marks the temporary expansion of The Artist’s Garden into the nearby Strand Lane Roman Baths. 

All three commissions demonstrate important ways in which women artists work in public spaces.  Resourceful in their use of materials and medium, they all use the body, they all incorporate a performative aspect, they use speech or song or silence, they are made by hand at the sewing machine or with the needle or clay or plaster.  The work’s scale is human, their duration is finite. Experienced in real physical time, they are sculptural encounters, ways of communicating narratives of place and non-place. The materials and form of the work will continue to exist, to be developed and re-used, to become part of a series.  The immaterial resonance of the work lives on in memory, experience and the stories the viewers tell of what they saw.  Their practices evade the ‘congealing of significance’ that occurs under the label of public art, their narratives of history and site are nuanced, profound and untold. 

About The Artist’s Garden

theCOLAB is an independent women-led collaborative laboratory working to bring together people, land and art by realising artists’ most far-flung and life-affirming work in response to places beyond the confines of the white cube for the public. The Artist’s Garden transformed the neglected half acre rooftop on Temple tube station into a vast free public sculpture garden to give women artists the opportunity to make their first, early or greatest outdoor sculptural intervention to promote greater appreciation of their work in public. The annual programme comprises major and smaller scale commissions and theCOLAB/Royal College of Art/Yorkshire Sculpture Park Graduate Award residency. theCOLAB is a registered charity. www.thecolab.art / @thecolab.art

Contact/Further information:  Alice Walters projects@thecolab.art | @thecolab.art