Renowned Artist Professor Dame Sonia Boyce RA will create a lasting testament to UCL’s past, present and future, as a special public art programme for UCL’s bicentenary is announced.
As UCL marks its 200th year, a varied public art programme will include a Legacy Commission, a UCL Staff Commission and an Artist-in-Residence Programme.
Acclaimed interdisciplinary artist, academic and educator Professor Dame Sonia Boyce, will create UCL’s Legacy Commission, a piece of art that will reflect two centuries of student curiosity and critical thought at UCL. Sonia will look to UCL’s heritage as a place for radical thought, inclusivity and excellence for her piece, which will take pride of place on UCL’s Bloomsbury campus from 2027.
As part of the redevelopment of the historic Cloisters and Wilkins Building, UCL’s own Professor Kristen Kreider (UCL Slade School of Fine Art) and Dr James O’Leary (UCL Bartlett School of Architecture) will create a permanent artwork in the newly created vestibule area.
Kreider + O’Leary will translate key moments in UCL’s history into a word-and-image set that will be transcribed onto pieces of historic stone salvaged from across UCL estate. The space is due to open in Spring 2026.
Also announced is UCL’s Artists-In-Residence programme. As Artist-In-Residence for UCL East, Abel Holsborough will place community at the core of their work. Inspired by the campus, Abel will investigate how community is built, how change is documented, and how organisational identity can be created through art.
Lauren Godfrey, as Artist-In-Residence for the UCL Student Community, will take a playful and engaging approach to the use of pattern to explore the key drivers of the student experience, whilst Artist Researcher Sarah Carne will explore her interests in labour, workforce, value and social parity through the UCL200 specialist research project.
Verity Jane-Keefe will be based at UCL’s Bloomsbury campus and hopes to create an artwork or intervention which investigates UCL’s past whilst engaging with its present.
Sam Wilkinson, Director of Public Art at UCL, said: "Rooted in collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and public engagement, the UCL200 Public Art Programme demonstrates how artists’ unique perspectives transform understandings of place, people, and knowledge by questioning, illuminating, and inviting interaction.
" "As we celebrate our 200th year and look to the next 200, we are thrilled to work with Sonia Boyce and an outstanding group of artists whose practices challenge and inspire. Sonia’s career and practice reflect a profound commitment to education and collaborative making. "Her approach-shaped by dialogue, exchange, and collective inquiry-mirrors UCL’s core values, making this partnership truly resonant and inspiring."
Dame Sonia said: "I am deeply honoured to have been commissioned by UCL to develop a public artwork for its historic Bloomsbury campus in celebration of its bicentenary.
" "I am looking forward to working with the University’s communities to develop a project that reflects the breadth and depth of the University’s research and teaching of the last 200 years and celebrate this invaluable institution as it moves into its third century."
Meet the artists
Dame Sonia Boyce
Sonia Boyce DBE RA is an interdisciplinary artist and academic working across film, drawing, photography, print, sound and installation. Boyce came to prominence in the early 1980s as a key figure in the burgeoning British Black Arts Movement with figurative pastel drawings and photo collages that addressed issues of race and gender in Britain. Since the 1990s, Boyce has shifted significantly to embrace a social practice that invites improvisation, collaboration, movement, and sound with other people. Working across a range of media, Boyce’s practice today is focused on questions of artistic authorship and cultural difference.
Kreider + O’Leary
Poet and architect duo, Kreider + O’Leary, collaborate to make performance, installation and time-based media work in relation to sites of cultural interest and political significance. They research, expose and interweave layers of meaning through image, object, action, text. Since 2003, they have made work in places such as prisons, military sites, film locations,Ölandscape gardens, desert environments and more traditional gallery venues across the UK, North America, Europe, Australia, South America and Japan. Their work has been shown at venues such as Tate Britain, Whitechapel Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts and included, for example, in the Lisbon Architecture Triennale and the Istanbul Biennial.
Lauren Godfrey
Lauren Godfrey is an artist based in London working across sculpture, drawing and large scale public projects. Lauren’s work offers space to the viewer whether that’s a moment in the presence of trickling water, a quasi-functional offering or a chance to get lost in an overload of pattern on pattern. Conversation and connection is central to the work, creating a dialogue and an atmosphere of joy and generosity.
Since graduating from the Slade, she has regularly exhibited across the world. Her large-scale public installations are at Newham Hospital, Coal Drops Yard and Kingsgate Workshops. Lauren also has a podcast, PATTERN PORTRAITS, in which she interviews fellow pattern lovers about their life and work through the lens of the patterned textiles and objects they surround themselves with.
Abel Holsborough
Abel Holsborough is a socially engaged artist, born & based in East London. They use installation, photography and performance in their work to explore the ’un-monumental’ and everyday.
Verity Jane-Keefe
Verity-Jane Keefe is a visual artist who works with text, archives, moving image, research, installation, performance, social structures and objects to explore the often-complex relationships between power, people and place. She is interested in the role of the artist within urban regeneration and places in flux and how experiential practice can touch upon and raise ambitions of existing and invisible communities.
Sarah Carne
Sarah Carne’s practice is concerned with thinking about the visibility, status and value of people, objects and labour and how these are assigned or ranked, determining how things are perceived and opportunities accessed. Of particular interest are age, gender and how society is structured to privilege those who can manifest confidence. She uses text, video, photography and conversation to question the metrics and language that serve as barriers, and to both map and form connections.
- University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT (0) 20 7679 2000
Sophie Hunter
T: +44 (0)7747 565 056,
E: sophie.hunter@ucl.ac.uk
