As part of Ben Judd’s Stanley Picker Fellowship project The Origin, a series of workshops, performances, talks and tours took place at Stanley Picker Gallery, a boat moored in Kingston Upon Thames and online throughout June and July 2021.

On 19 June, Dani Admiss gave a talk online about her research. Dani is a curator and researcher working across the fields of design, art, technology and science, and was appointed Stanley Picker Fellow in 2020. Her approach is framed by world-making practices and community-based research prioritising these as lenses to explore alternative forms of curatorial practice.

Admiss will be explored histories of contamination and ideas of purity, through micropollutants caused by the abundant use of chemicals in our daily lives. Her Fellowship project Cycles of Toxicity is a collaborative fabulation that brings together various communities to retrace the lives of chemical pollutants as they travel through bodies and ecosystems.

Ben Judd’s Stanley Picker Fellowship project The Origin reflects on Britain’s island status, both literal and metaphorical, and how islands shape the communities that live there. The Origin brings together the communities surrounding the Stanley Picker Gallery – from Kingston University students and academics to local networks, charities and residents – and asks them to imagine a classless, stateless, humane society based on common ownership. A temporary community, an experiment in living, a fictional island group. This collaborative project culminates this summer with an installation at the Gallery, a boat on the River Thames and a series of performances, workshops and events – a rehearsal for an alternative future.