HOW to PLAY OBEY and SERVE

 A Performance Lecture
by Flora Duley

26 February 2025 | 4-6pm 

at The Artist’s Garden, on the roof of
Temple tube station, London, WC2R 2PH

What 3 Words: almost.engine.probetheCOLAB presents the debut Performance Lecture of Flora Duley, the fifth recipient of theCOLAB/Royal College of Art/Yorkshire Sculpture Park Graduate Award 2024, ‘How to Play Obey and Serve’.   It signals the culmination of her three-month residency that takes place in the Artist’s Hut at the Artist’s Garden, the world’s first sculpture garden dedicated to the work of women artists, a project realised in partnership with Westminster City Council. 

At this vast, open-air space, the public is free to come and go, to contemplate the works, the canopy of sky or the adjacent Thames and, uniquely, to talk to a practising artist.  Duley’s sculptural practice involves interaction with the public.  She talks and listens to everybody, looking at the way they interact and use the space.  She views The Artist’s Garden as ‘a social organism’, a place that has ‘done away with power structures’.  Here, cleaners, low paid workers, labourers share space with economists, office workers, academics and artists.  They convene in a free to access public space that has made its own rules and defined its own freedoms.  But what are its rules? How can an artist make work for and about this place?  How can she make work for such a diverse and random range of people? How can we sustain the open invitation of this unique place?   

Duley turned mind to researching the roots of this ‘social organism’ in her characteristically non-linear, rule-free way.  She discovered that Arundel House (from which 180 Strand now towers) over which the Artist’s Garden partially lies, was given to the brother of Henry VIII, who offered his new wife Jane Seymour, once responsible for household management as a lady in waiting, an ornately engraved cup.  It bore the motto: ‘Bound to Obey and Serve’.  The cup was melted down one hundred years later by King Charles 1. Immediate links were formed in Duley’s mind between the master/servant relationship and societies structured to oppress through rules relating to sex or class.  Of course, Henry VIII is well known for bringing the game of Real Tennis into the palace, a game with a complex set of rules from which lawn tennis emerged.  Less well known is that it originated as a game played by the poor in the public open space of Europe’s streets. Conceived by those who obey and serve, it was elevated to the sport of kings and brought within the interior of the palace.  Even within the palace version of the game, the ‘gutter’ commonly known as the ‘trough’ retained the important function of being the place where the carefully hand stitched balls, played with only once, roll into. 

Duley is experimenting with the form of the performance lecture to construct a dynamic and unpredictable guide to the rules of ‘HOW TO PLAY OBEY AND SERVE’.  Her thoughts on place and societal structures will take the form of a participatory game in the making, which will take place outside at the Artist’s Garden, an unruly, unacademic site overlooked by London’s foremost academic institutions King’s College London, the London School of Economics and The Courtauld Institute of Art.  With experimental script in hand and using guttering, balls and a willing audience she intends to tell, teach and provoke thought and action relating to hierarchies, rules, histories and commands such as ‘obey and serve’.  

Performance Lecture:

26 February 2025 | 4 – 6 pm | Tea, cake and conversation | All Welcome 

Open daily from 8am with seasonal closing times at dusk, free and open to all

The Artist is in the hut on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 11.30 – 4pm until 10 March 2025  

Notes for Editors

About theCOLAB / RCA / YSP Graduate Award

Originally established in 2015, the Award took on an expanded form when theCOLAB was invited to select the winner(s) following the pandemic in 2021.  theCOLAB offers a residency and the opportunity for an artist graduating from Royal College of Art’s MA Sculpture programme to undertake a residency in the Artist’s Hut, to have vital exposure to the public and to be taken through the complex process of creating outdoor public sculpture.  It provides vital support and a platform for thinking and making at the critical transition stage from being a student to independent artist. This builds on YSP’s long-standing commitment to supporting artists at every stage of their career. The award is bespoke to each recipient and establishes long-term relationships and opportunities.  Alex Hodby (YSP) and Claire Mander (theCOLAB) selected Flora Duley from the RCA MA Sculpture Degree Show in 2024.  She joins Camilla Bliss, Abigail Norris, Rong Bao, and Annabel Tennyson-Davies as recipient of the award.

About Flora Duley

Flora Duley completed her MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 2024 and took her BA Fine Art from UAL Chelsea College of Art in 2016 and her foundation in Art and Design at CCW UAL. Selected exhibitions and commissions include: ‘The Bat is simply an advanced Pear’, ACE Invited Artist, SPUDworks, 2024; "Is there something I should know that I don't know already?", Standpoint Gallery, 2024;  6th Sense Collective Residency, 2024; 'Urban Garden Project', Natural History Museum/ACAVA Communities, North Kensington, 2023; Young People Project 2023, John Hansard Gallery; ‘Playful', Co-Created Exhibition where?when?: 'Refugee and Asylum Seeker Project’, ASPEX and PCOS, 2022. She lives and works in London and Hayling Island.

Flora Duley’s work activates the social context of sculpture by setting up absurd situations which question hierarchies and conformity.  Her sculptural space is communal, playful and experimental, using games and play as a critique of institutional public engagement and art education.   Her work interrogates the rules of games and how they reflect the structures and norms that define and often confine societies.  From table tennis matches in lifts to an opera set made of yoga bricks, the theatricality of the work is reflected in the tactile, textured and colourful neon balls, stretch bands, mats, bats and equipment that are the remnants of consumerist games. 

About the Artist’s Garden

The Artist’s Garden was a neglected public space, reclaimed as a platform for women artists and launched in 2021.  Built by Sir Joseph Bazalgette in 1870 as part of Victoria Embankment to resolve the ‘Great Stink’, it is thought to be on the site of Lord and Lady Arundel’s seventeenth century garden where they displayed England’s first classical sculpture collection. The 1,400 sqm space is invisible from street level and reached by well-worn steps at the top of which a massive space opens up, offering spectacular views from the Houses of Parliament to Tate Modern.  The Artist’s Garden opened in October 2021 with Lakwena’s ‘Back in the Air: a Meditation on Higher Ground’. Growing organically and overlaying the first, the second major commission by Heywood & Condie, ‘Through the Cosmic Allotment’ explores plant human communication through landscapes installed in four greenhouses exploring aspects of our cosmic understanding of landscape. This was followed by Holly Hendry’s first public sculpture in London ‘Slackwater’ and is now the site of MARY MARY a nine artist strong exhibition of the contrary and cacophonous work of 

‘The Artist’s Garden’ is supported by and realised in partnership with Westminster City Council.  With thanks to Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Royal College of Art, WSP UK, and with kind permission of LUL/Transport for London. The Artist’s Garden and its collaboration with RCA/YSP will continue until the end of 2025.

For more information, images or to arrange an interview please contact info@thecolab.art and visit www.thecolab.art