Christopher Stead

Christopher Stead is a London-based interdisciplinary artist, curator and documentarian of British counterculture. In 2016 Christopher graduated with a First Class BA Hons in Fine Art at the City and Guilds of London Art School, receiving the Painter-Stainers Scholarship Prize and Brian Till Art History Thesis Award.

He is the co-founder and director of the London-based curatorial collective Pigeon Park, created in response to the post-pandemic threat posed to artists’ working conditions in the wake of the Covid crisis. Through collaboration, Pigeon Park works with emerging and established artists to create immersive exhibitions in unique spaces, fostering artistic growth and engagement within the public sphere in times of restrictions, cutbacks and uncertainty.

His works have been shown widely both here in the UK and in Berlin, Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Helsinki, including solo presentations at Fold Gallery (London 2022), Lab Kalkhorst Residency (Baltic Sea 2020) & Urban Spree (Berlin 2020) and an upcoming solo show with Ruttkowski 68 in Cologne Autumn 2023.

I don't remember having many toys as a child, but I do remember taking my mother's knitting ball, unravelling it and attaching it to every piece of furniture in the living room. When my mother returned, she screamed in shock (my first critic). Little did I know at the time, but this was both my first childhood memory and my first installation.

Fast forward to the future, and not much has changed. Guided by a short boredom threshold and the belief that the best things in life are free, unloved materials are gleaned from the bins, bushes and building sites of London, then up-cycled into a bubbling stock of discarded detritus that is woven together to create sculptural systems which index the past, the present and futures lost to the hand of time. Born from economic and ecological circumstances, this shape-shifting way of making focuses on the conditions of post-pandemic materiality in its need to turn life's lemons into lemonade through the currency of found matter amid the cost of living crisis.

The recycled stock grows and gathers like a starter dough into a reusable source, which can be repurposed repeatedly, creating a regenerative practice that reimagines spaces, both post-industrial and institutional, into reference points of regional, cultural and collective memory, inviting collaboration, participation and play.