Participation & Installation
The Counsel was developed as part of Waterloo Festival 2026 at St John’s Waterloo, bringing together participation, installation and live performance to explore systems of belief, symbolic creatures and collective imagination.
Rather than beginning with a finished artwork, The Counsel began with a simple invitation: What voice or belief helps you navigate uncertainty?
Throughout the festival, visitors were invited to contribute beliefs, memories, rituals, prayers, superstitions and personal sayings to a papier-mâché fox encyclopaedia. Rather than collecting definitive answers, the work gradually assembled a living archive of voices shaped by different ways of making sense of the world, opening a space for collective imagination to emerge.
Alongside these contributions, symbolic creatures and wearable sculptures from my ongoing project COUNCIL OF THE NINE appeared across installations, workshops, conversations and public spaces. Gradually shifting from static objects into recurring figures, they connected different encounters, participants and locations throughout the festival.
Rather than positioning visitors as spectators, The Counsel invited them to become participants and co-authors. Contributions, conversations and gestures accumulated within the installation before being carried into three live activations across the Crypt, Garden and finally the Nave.
PERFORMANCE
Developed from this participatory archive, the performances returned collected voices to bodies, movement and sound. Wearable sculptures from COUNCIL OF THE NINE were activated as shifting personas, each carrying different impulses around identity, virtue, vigilance, belonging, pleasure, strength and ways of navigating the world.
Written contributions from the fox encyclopaedia were read, fragmented and improvised alongside movement, vocal exercises and fragments of hymns. Languages of ritual, personality, performance and belief were brought together without settling into a single authority or coherent system. At times ceremonial, playful and deliberately absurd, the work asked what happens when the structures we use to understand ourselves are embodied, repeated and performed collectively.
Moving from the intimacy of the Crypt into the Garden and eventually the Nave, The Counsel gradually opened outward. Sculptures passed between bodies, visitors became participants, and voices gathered earlier in the festival returned in altered forms.
The performances were therefore not a conclusion, but a continuation: a temporary redistribution of the voices, symbols and beliefs that had already been entrusted to the work.
St John’s Waterloo
London
July 2026