Diana Puntar, Chimera (H±R-A) An Alternative Kingston Heritage Trail

Chimera (H±R-A) Historical Re-Anachronism is an alternative heritage and sculpture trail around Kingston town centre by artist Diana Puntar, co-commissioned by Stanley Picker Gallery at Kingston University and the Royal Borough of Kingston for Kingston 2025. Pick up a free guide at one of the main trail venues.

The trail features artworks that explore the transformation of historical objects, such as the Kingston Coronation Stone, into symbols of English heritage, with locations including Kingston University’s Town House Library, Kingston Museum, Frederick W Paine Funeral Museum and All Saints Church. Puntar’s project places new sculptures within existing heritage sites and ongoing community engagement, to question the role of monuments in shaping collective memory and cultural identity.

Chimera (H±R-A) begins with a monumental sculptural piece in the entrance hall of Town House Library at Kingston University. The work presents a tableau with the Kingston Coronation Stone reemerging from its Neolithic bedrock, whilst a woolly mammoth-like form slowly sinks into the landscape. This frozen moment presents a possible origin story of Southwest London’s earliest inhabitants…”Where England Began”. Rising from the sculpture is a single post, its bone-like surface etched with text and imagery recalling scrimshaw, the age-old practice of engraving whale bone as a way of marking time and memory across vast oceanic journeys. Puntar will gradually include more engravings on this sculpture, generated through a series of mark-making workshops with underrepresented local communities.

Further artworks can be found hidden throughout Kingston, alongside a number of existing heritage sites around the town. ‘Neolithic tools’ of questionable provenance appear within the display cases of the Kingston Museum, a series of ‘funerary talisman’ in the windows of The Frederick W Paine Funeral Museum, and a ‘neolithic relic’ inside All Saints Church.

Puntar’s project interrogates hierarchical power structures, challenging the way histories and heritage are constructed, maintained and controlled. By examining who is included and who is excluded from the dominant narrative, the work provides space for alternative perspectives previously marginalised or erased, suggesting that heritage is not static, but an evolving space open to reinterpretation.

Biography

Diana Puntar is a London based artist originally from New York City. Her cross-disciplinary works include sculpture, installation, drawing, and printmaking. Chimera(H±R-A) forms a new chapter of Puntar’s ongoing project Historical Re-Anachronism, where the artist has explored American national (counter)histories, often using humour as a vehicle to look at colonisation and its continuum, which she feels are reflected in ongoing political and ecological problems.

She has been an artist-in-residence at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, and Eltham College in Southeast London. She is a member of Cubitt Artists, London, where she previously served as Studio Artist Co-Chair of Public Programmes. In 2023, Puntar had her first solo exhibition in London, Historical Re-Anachronism, Ultima Romanus, at the Gerald Moore Gallery. This exhibition invited viewers to reconsider history by questioning the fluidity of cultural identity and the complex tensions between tradition and progress.

Puntar holds an MFA in SMFA/Tufts University, Boston, and a BA in Sculpture from the University of Maryland, College Park.