About
Projects:
-
East London Smells
- A Place of Our Making
- Shadow Play
- Soft Walls
CV
Photography by Richard Stonehouse
2025
East London Smells is a practice-based research project exploring how sensory experiences beyond sight can connect people, cultures, and communities.
Commissioned through the Trellis Programme at UCL, the project was developed in collaboration with Prof. Ava Fatah gen. Schieck (The Bartlett Institute of Environmental Design and Engineering) to investigate the sensory and built landscapes of Brick Lane. Celebrating the area’s unique identity while addressing the threat of the encroaching “Smooth City”, the research identifies how individuals and communities assert their presence and agency in neighbourhoods faced with gentrification.
Over 15 months, East London Smells was co-developed with Beyond Sight Loss, a user-led peer support organisation for blind and partially sighted people living and working in Tower Hamlets. Through workshops, sensory walks and collaborative making, participants shared insights into how they navigate the city through sounds, smells, touch, and taste. Together, we formed a deep understanding of how non-visual senses shape our experience of place and developed an approach to challenging traditional placemaking that advocated for more inclusive, imperfect and adaptable urban spaces.
The collaboration culminated in a scent map of Brick Lane, co-created through a multisensory approach to sculpture and exhibited as part of A Place of Our Making (UCL East, March-April 2025). Inspired by the site’s history of brickmaking, the installation used recycled paper, spices, and coconut to form tactile “bricks” that invited visitors to reflect on the sensory richness of the area and what might be lost through redevelopment.
To document the project, I collaborated with Joe Rizzo Naudi, a blind audio describer, to facilitate a workshop with Beyond Sight Loss, creating an inclusive record of the work. Sound artist Louis Rizzo Naudi captured recordings, which were then passed to a writer who used the material to create a poem. The exhibition is written and read aloud by Gayathiri Kamalakanthan. Listen here.
Following the exhibition, the project was presented at the Blindness and Expanded Sculpture conference (Henry Moore Institute, March 2025) and later evolved into a sensorial activism workshop for the British Science Festival (Liverpool, September 2025).