Dr Tse-Hui Teh collaborates with artist on installation at Olympic Park

As part of the Trellis: Public Art programme,  four artist:research partnerships have been commissioned to make work for an exhibition in October 2019.

Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Trellis is a project exploring how to create opporunities for knowledge exchange between UCL researcher and east London aritsts.

For more information on the project as a whole you can see the full announcement here.

Dr. Tse-Hui Teh (Lecturer in Urban Design and Planning) and Dr. Lena Ciric(Senior Lecturer in Microbiology) are working with artist Amanda Lwin on a project that seeks to change people’s feelings about urine. As a society we’ve forgotten that urine is an incredible, free source of nitrogen – pee is regarded as a waste product and flushed down the drain, along with litres of drinking-quality water. Rather than consuming fossil fuels (in the production of ammonia) to fertilise our fields, while wasting both water and urine, the project proposes ways to celebrate urine as a useful, natural product linking our bodies to fertility, water infrastructure and the landscape. 

The project involves the production of watering cans that double as (female) urinals which are, over the summer, distributed to allotment holders and community garden volunteers in the boroughs that surround the Olympic Park. In the autumn, the participants in the project gather at the Park to witness their vessels being festooned on a frame, which converts into a water fountain. A kind of temporary water fountain that disappears after two weeks, as the participants retrieve their vessels. The artwork becomes an ephemeral celebration of water, so essential to our cities yet so strangely invisible.