UCL200 Public Art programme

The UCL Bicentenary is a moment to reflect on our bold beginnings, celebrate our present, and imagine the future we want to build together. 

The UCL200 Public Art Programme will be a celebration of UCL’s origins as the first university in London and a bold statement of its ambitions for the next 200 years.

Running from Spring 2026 through to 2027, the UCL200 Public Art programme is inspired by UCL – its research, teaching, and communities – and brings together staff, students, researchers, local partners and artists to reflect on UCL’s history and identity and to help shape the next chapter of our story.

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What to expect

The UCL200 Public Art Programme comprises three strands.

Legacy Artwork

Acclaimed interdisciplinary artist, academic and educator Dame Sonia Boyce is creating UCL’s Legacy Commission, a permanent artwork situated at UCL’s Bloomsbury campus. reflecting two centuries of curiosity and critical thought at UCL.

Due to open in 2027, the work will result from Sonia’s creative encounter with a campus that is both steeped in history and alive with forward-thinking ideas. Whether through form, material, or narrative, the work will echo UCL’s enduring reputation as a space of curiosity, inclusive excellence, and transformational knowledge.

Sonia Boyce’s practice spans over four decades and is grounded in an interdisciplinary, socially engaged methodology that brings together film, sound, performance, installation, pattern, and archival research. Emerging from the British Black Arts Movement, her work addresses questions of race, gender, representation, and visibility through collaborative, improvisational processes that position audiences as active participants. 

Artist in Residence programme

Artists Lauren Godfrey, Abel Holsborough, Verity-Jane Keefe and Artist Researcher Sarah Carne are embedded in UCL’s Bloomsbury and East campuses and student and staff communities; exploring celebrating, and challenging the culture of the institution at this important moment in its history. 

Verity-Jane Keefe, the artist-in-residence at UCL’s Bloomsbury campus, is creating a collaborative intervention which investigates UCL’s past whilst engaging with its present. Jane-Keefe investigates power, visible and invisible histories and authority – paying attention to UCL’s urban context and the campus politics throughout its past. 

Artist-in-residence Abel Holsborough has situated themselves within UCL’s east London campus. As a socially engaged artist, raised in East London, Holsborough is investigating how a community is built, how change is documented, and how we catalyse an organisational identity that reflects the lives lived around it.  

Lauren Godfrey, the artist-in-residence for the UCL student community is taking a playful and engaging approach to the use of pattern to explore the key drivers of the student experience, working in collaboration with Students’ Union UCL. 

Artistic researcher Sarah Carne is exploring her interests in labour, workforce, value and social parity to create a new film with staff across UCL. 

UCL staff commission: Physical legacy work

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) – known collectively as Kreider + O’Leary - have created a permanent artwork in the newly created vestibule area. 

Their installation, called Spolia Index, was installed in May 2026 and completes the redevelopment of UCL’s historic Cloisters and Wilkins Building. Prof Kreider and Dr O’Leary engraved a unique series of glyphs, inspired by UCL’s fascinating history, on to pieces of York, Purbeck and Portland stone, salvaged from across UCL.  

The stonework denotes key moments in UCL’s 200-year-old history, including text from UCL’s foundation stone, and is now on permanent display in the newly created vestibule area on UCL’s Bloomsbury campus. 

Find out more about ‘Spoila Index’.

Meet the artists 

Dame Sonia Boyce DBE RA

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

Kreider + O’Leary are a poet and an architect who collaborate to make performance, installation and time-based media work in relation to sites of cultural interest and political significance. Combining situated practice and material poetics, they research, expose and interweave layers of meaning through image, object, action, text. 

Their aim is to realise possibilities of place through a transformative imaginary. Since 2003, they have made work in places such as prisons, military sites, film locations, landscape gardens, desert environments and more traditional gallery venues across the UK, North America, Europe, Australia, South America and Japan. 

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 including a solo show at De La Warr Pavilion in 2019 and group shows at Krupa Gallery, London (2025), Outpost, Norwich (2025) Irvine Fine Arts in Los Angeles (2022) and Vitrine Gallery, London (2017). Her large-scale public installations are at Newham Hospital, Coal Drops Yard and Kingsgate Workshops.

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. Abel’s work with organisations such as Artsadmin (Artist in-Residence 2023/24), Grizedale Arts (ongoing) and Create London (ongoing resident-artist A House for Artists) often links to ideas of identity, belonging and memory.

Verity-Jane Keefe

Verity-Jane Keefe is a visual artist working 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. 

She has recently delivered public commissions with Towner Gallery (Eastbourne), Barts Hospital AiR and is a Wheatley Fellow with Eastside Projects until October (Birmingham) and has just completed a Pre-Doc programme with ZHdK (Zurich). Her solo exhibition The Artist, The Community, The Council and The Philanthropist is showing at Eastside Projects from October 3rd until December 6th.

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.

Meet the team