A Panel Discussion: On the notion of History in the public realm with Valda Jackson, Hew Locke and Richard Drayton chaired by Sarah Staton (Organised with Rebecca Fortnum)

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Valda Jackson is a multidisciplinary artist and a published writer working towards completion of her first novel. In her writing, 2D, moving images and her sculptures, Jackson creates complex narratives that reflect and question our past and present with intent on influencing our future. Her work is about existence; it’s about survival, individual entitlement, privilege and dignity. These themes extend themselves into much of her Public Art Commissions where the personal becomes universal. Jackson’s collaborative public art practice Jackson&Harris is currently commissioned By Peabody at St Johns Hill in Clapham, London, for a series of public sculptures integrated into the architecture. Phase one, completed in 2017 was awarded the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association (PMSA) award for excellence in public sculpture. The work in phase one explored and reflected the history of the Peabody estate, while the current phase investigates contemporary life.

Hew Locke was born in Edinburgh, UK, in 1959; lived from 1966 to 1980 in Georgetown, Guyana; and is currently based in London. He obtained a B.A. Fine Art in Falmouth (1988) and an M.A. Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London (1994). In 2000 he won both a Paul Hamlyn Award and an East International Award.

His work is represented in many collections including those of the The Government Art Collection, The Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Tate Gallery, The Arts Council of England, The National Trust, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Brooklyn Museum, New York, 21c, The New Art Gallery Walsall, The Victoria & Albert Museum, The Imperial War Museum, The British Museum and The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.

Richard Drayton was born in Guyana and grew up in Barbados, where he went to school at Harrison College. He left the Caribbean as a Barbados Scholar to Harvard University, going then to Yale, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation under the direction of Paul Kennedy and Frank Turner. He also spent two years as a graduate student at Balliol College, Oxford as the Commonwealth Caribbean Rhodes Scholar. In 1992 he first came to Cambridge as a Research Fellow of St Catharine's College, moving back to Oxford in 1994 to be Darby Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Lincoln College. After 1998, he was Associate Professor of British History at the University of Virginia. In 2001, he returned to Cambridge as University Lecturer in Imperial and extra-European History since 1500, and as Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Corpus Christi College. In 2002 he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for History. He was Visiting Professor of History at Harvard University in Spring 2009. He came to King's as Rhodes Professor in 2009.

Sarah Staton is Senior Tutor in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art. Sarah Staton uses diverse media and mediums to investigate current interests and obsessions, producing an expanded notion of sculpture with a regard for sculpture’s social potential. Staton has a particular interest in revealing materials’ capacity to enhance both site and experience. Staton creates sculpture for a variety of contexts, including the gallery, the book and the public realm. Through allusions to utilitarianism, and an exploratory use of synthetic and natural materials, she devises spaces, objects and arrangements that are marked by their socio-economic reality, seeking a modest purpose – to enable revelry and reverie. Staton uses materials' affective dimension – their ability to trigger associations and psychological responses – to supplement the established modernist coupling of form and function with a third term, feeling – an important but elusive texture for public art and urban design. Through 'threshold sculptures' which are simultaneously formal and functional, aesthetic and utilitarian, her off modern practice questions how design and the specific haptic properties of materials can dynamise site and experience. Current public projects include significant public art commissions for three sites to the Western extent of the London Super Sewer and Alphonse (2019 ), a bespoke brick and tile inhabitable archway for a lakeside side situation at Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire.

Image caption : Valda Jackson, All Our Tomorrows - Father and child (detail), carved brick