Turner Prize winner Jasleen Kaur is set to unveil her first permanent public artwork next month in Thamesmead, south-east London. Titled was. Is. will be., The new sculpture will be installed beside Southmere Lake in Cygnet Square and officially revealed on 28 November.
Commissioned by Peabody, the housing association overseeing Thamesmead’s redevelopment, the project has been shaped in collaboration with residents. Five community members, including filmmaker Comfort Adeneye and photographer Gonzalo Fuentes, collaborated with the artist as part of a creative studio established for the commission. The project also involves the creative agency Studio Danmole and the public art consultancy Company, Place.
Kaur said: “The commissioning model is what I was really drawn to, with the setup being that young creatives in Thamesmead were supported to be involved through an entire commissioning process; somewhere between mentorship and paid internship. I love that they, as residents and artists in their own right, have a stake in or claim to a public artwork being planned for their area as it undergoes an immense period of change. It’s a really non-hierarchical approach to working together; knowledge is moving horizontally rather than vertically.
“I love that they, as residents and artists in their own right, have a stake or claim to a public artwork being planned for their area as it goes through an immense period of change,” Kaur writes on Thamesmead’s website. Her statement reads less like press language and more like genuine gratitude—a recognition that public art only matters if it belongs to the people who live beside it.
According to the project team, Kaur’s sculpture embeds “fragments of local conversation” into the landscape, culminating in the words ‘horses are here’ raised high in the skyline. It’s a phrase that sounds both ordinary and cryptic, like a whispered omen or a line from an overheard story.
The commission forms part of Peabody’s long-term cultural strategy, which has already brought several significant works to Thamesmead. In 2021, Bob and Roberta Smith presented The Thamesmead Codex, a series of painted boards chronicling local dialogue. Later this year, Ackroyd & Harvey will plant a circle of seven oak trees in Crossway Park—a direct echo of Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks, the 1980s environmental artwork that fused art, ecology, and activism.
Thamesmead itself remains one of London’s great architectural contradictions. Conceived in the 1960s as “the town of the future,” its Brutalist housing blocks rose from reclaimed marshland, promising a better, cleaner modern life. Instead, it became a backdrop for dystopian cinema—most famously Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Decades later, art has returned as part of its renewal, not as a veneer, but as a connective tissue.
For Kaur, who grew up Sikh in Glasgow, where her family ran a cash-and-carry business, sculpture is often a means of grounding identity in material. Her work combines humour, ritual, and domestic history. At Tate Britain’s Turner Prize exhibition last year, her red Ford Escort—draped in a cotton doily and blaring devotional music—was both familiar and surreal. When she won, she seized the moment to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, standing alongside protesters gathered outside.
In Thamesmead, Kaur’s voice shifts from protest to permanence. Was. Is. Will be. Feels like a conversation made solid, a sculpture shaped from listening. It’s less about commemoration and more about continuity—a monument to what’s changing, and to what remains.
Portrait of Jasleen Kaur. Photo: Robin Christian via Instagram