Rong Bao’s ‘infinite garden pathway’ is inspired by the tactile yellow paving slabs used to guide the visually impaired around Beijing. Following paths like this across cities worldwide, Bao realised that many led straight into brick walls, down blind alleys, or were being misused as zig-zag floor decorations. The visually impaired users have been forgotten as buildings rise and fall in the rapidly developing urban landscape.

Bao’s Yellow Path (2024) critiques the urbanists’ disregard for the visually impaired by creating a never-ending path, leading us anti-clockwise North for five metres then abruptly West, then South, then East. It presents a constant struggle with orientation, direction and ascertaining beginnings and endings. That is, until we yield to the invitation to experience sculpture and movement through senses beyond sight.

Bao playfully converts the brittle fixed concrete slab into tiles of lurid yellow, the last colour to be lost as sight deteriorates, densely bristled with raised dots forming the words of a poem-work in Braille, composed by visually impaired poet Alex Donnelly. Braille is the tactile writing system that contracts and abbreviates common word and letter combinations into patterns of raised dots, a process reflected in the condensing of meaning into the few laden words of the poem-work.

A Poem-work for Yellow Path by Alex Donnelly:

Carefully by rock or mural stray,
stoke river ply,
flex one pulse, far pad-tap inlay –
a latent night, tomorrow’s day,
like an imagination’s panoply
errs, amid a shadowed square, in play.

The sculpture-poem-work is formed using Grade 2 Braille, a system of condensed words and phrases, as opposed to Grade 1 Braille, which is an alphabet. There are two lines of text along each edge of the path. Only readable by two percent of people, Braille’s use in the work becomes a metaphor for the unheard voices of the visually impaired community. You are invited to walk on Yellow Path, with or without shoes, in either direction, and to listen to the audio description guide, which includes the poem in spoken form. www.thecolab.art/audioguideThe poem and sculpture are integrated into an experience of the obscure and the revelatory, which is accompanied by the aural experience of the downloadable audio description guide.

Yellow Path is supported by the British Council’s Connections Through Culture grant programme.

About Rong Bao

Rong Bao (b. 1997, China) completed her MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 2023. She studied Public Sculpture at the China Academy of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, receiving her BFA in 2021. She was in the Top 10 emerging artists selected by China UCCA, shortlisted for New Contemporaries 2022 and received the Royal Society of Sculptors' Gilbert Bayes Award and the COLAB/Royal College of Art/Yorkshire Sculpture Park Graduate Award, Her first solo exhibition, "Rong Bao is Me,", Saatchi Gallery (2024), was the first solo exhibition by a female Chinese artist at the gallery. She was commissioned by Tate Collective, and her work is in collections including the Art Algorithm Capital Art Foundation, LAM Museum.

About The Artist’s Garden

theCOLAB is an independent women-led collaborative laboratory working to bring together people, land and art by realising artists’ most far-flung and life-affirming work in response to places beyond the confines of the white cube for the public. The Artist’s Garden transformed the neglected half acre rooftop on Temple tube station into a vast free public sculpture garden to give women artists the opportunity to make their first, early or greatest outdoor sculptural intervention to promote greater appreciation of their work in public. The annual programme comprises major and smaller scale commissions and theCOLAB/Royal College of Art/Yorkshire Sculpture Park Graduate Award residency. theCOLAB is a registered charity. www.thecolab.art / @thecolab.art

MARY MARY and The Artist’s Garden is realised in partnership with and supported by Westminster City Council and private philanthropists with support from the British Council’s Connections Through Culture Grant for Rong Bao’s Yellow Path and with the kind permission of LUL/Transport for London. With thanks to WSP UK, Frieze 91 and Mezcal Reina for their support.

For more information, images or to arrange an interview please contact Mary Doherty / mary@sam-talbot.com and visit www.thecolab.art