Breathe:2022: Dryden Goodwin’s climate conscious art lives on Lewisham’s walls

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Breathe:2022: Dryden Goodwin’s climate conscious art lives on Lewisham’s walls

For London Borough of Culture 2022 celebrations in Lewisham, we teamed up with Invisible Dust to show Breathe:2022 by Dryden Goodwin – a flagship commission in the year-long programme.

As a project that’s both public art and an environmental message, Breathe:2022 with Dryden Goodwin reinstates an earlier 2012 work of the same name, now updated to be at home on Lewisham’s streets today. Created alongside London air quality scientists, the work underlines the urgency of conversations around air pollution. Featuring over 1000 enlarged hand-sketches of local people who bear witness to the impacts of poor air quality in the borough (and city beyond), the sets of drawings form photo-in-motion sequences that show people labouring to inhale and exhale.

Invisible Dust approached us to install Dryden Goodwin’s piece across Lewisham – in the “choked underpasses of busy bridges” and on the Old Town Hall in Catford. As a piece that’s grand in size and scale, Breathe:2022 is imposing and thought-provoking. Occupying prominent spaces in the centre of Lewisham, Hither Green, Forest Hill and Catford, it will raise climate consciousness in the borough, with an events and engagement series running around it. As Invisible Dust notes, “Breathe:2022 asks us to both stay with the claustrophobia of ‘fighting for breath’ but begin to look upwards and outwards, towards the possibilities of community action and a clean air future for all.”

31.05.22

Words by BUILDHOLLYWOOD

Lewisham has often been at the centre of national conversations around air quality. The locally founded Ella Roberta Family Foundation is central to this, after campaign work that followed the tragic and untimely death of 9-year-old Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah after an asthma attack. In a landmark ruling in 2020, a coroner found “exposure to excessive air pollution” had contributed to her illness. Ella’s mother and founder of the foundation, Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, is one of the six locals who feature in Dryden’s artwork. She continues to raise awareness of both life-threatening air pollution and asthma, campaigning for children’s right to breathe clean air.

Alongside Rosamund, the drawings depict founders and participants of local activist groups, Choked Up, Mums for Lungs, and Clean Air for Catford, as well as a young school child, and the artist’s 15-year-old son – who was ‘fighting to breathe’ in Dryden Goodwin’s original 2012 piece.

After the six-month takeover of Lewisham’s streets, Breathe:2022 will culminate in large-scale projections animating its 1000-plus drawings. Brought to life with the help of We Are Lewisham, The Albany and the Mayor of London’s Culture team, it shows that art and campaigning can come together on the streets of the city to catalyse vital conversations, expand awareness, and promote community action – BUILDHOLLYWOOD is delighted to be a part of it.

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