David Blandy

Trēow of Time, Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, 2023

Trēow of Time, Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, 2023
A UCL East Public Art Commission
UCL East Marshgate Campus
Photo credits: Richard Stonehouse

For their first permanent artwork, Larry Achiampong and David Blandy engaged in conversations with UCL academics and responded to the landscape surrounding the new UCL East campus. They have created a hyper-real installation inspired by 3D video gaming and their time spent between the natural and virtual realms. The work was conceived during the Covid-19 pandemic, and it reflects on a time of collective re-discovery of nature as a source of healing and wellbeing, whilst simultaneously highlighting inequalities that exist in access to green spaces.

The film was shot on location in Epping Forest, which once stretched down to Romford Road. Local people helped save the forest from destruction in the1870s, preserving it for future generations. In the film, we follow Achiampong’s son (an east London resident) as he marvels at a huge, ancient oak tree. His presence deliberately challenges racist ideas about who belongs in the English countryside, reclaiming it as a space for everyone.

The artwork is a meditation on our relationship to nature: vital to our wellbeing but inevitably reduced by urban development. Trēow of Time expands investigations into anthropology, science fiction, and the virtual, offering a vision of the place we find ourselves in, yet pointing towards a better world. The work suggests that the rewilding of the world is inevitable. Achiampong and Blandy sought to reflect how nature can reveal a different relationship with our senses and our bodies, how shifting scale can modify our sense of connection to the natural world, revealing co-dependency as key to forming a new paradigm. Additionally, by reflecting on the places where we find and lose our selves, in the forest of nature and the virtual forest of free-roaming sandbox videogames. 

Stills from: Trēow of Time, Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, 2023

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Commission Credits:
Directors: Larry Achiampong & David Blandy
Drone: Larry Achiampong / Camera: David Blandy 
Macro Camera: Claire Barrett
Editors & Grading: David Blandy & Claire Barrett
Soundtrack: Larry Achiampong
Actor: Sinai Achiampong
Location Manager: Louise Searle
Research & Producer: Claire Barrett
Art Fabricator: Setworks Limited
Curator: Sam Wilkinson, UCL Head of Public Art

UCL East Marshgate Campus: Along with Pool Street West, Marshgate is part of UCL East, a new world-class UCL campus located on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

Marshgate will be home to new degree programmes, research, innovation and technologies from across eight UCL faculties – uniting activities across Experiments, Arts, Society & Technology (EAST), as well as a range of academic centres.