Max King turns social history into sculptural marvels

Your Space Or Mine

Max King turns social history into sculptural marvels

The artist is taking over BUILDHOLLYWOOD’s pocket sculpture garden in south London with an intricate installation that reaches back into Camberwell’s past

Max King has a knack for showing familiar objects and structures in a new light, and often in completely different proportions. Working in sculpture and installations, he toys with scale and perspective to create new encounters for his audiences, whether by collapsing buildings and other architectural structures into miniature models, or by blowing up small, everyday items such as pin badges into large-scale pieces that people can walk around. To him, presenting typical places and objects in atypical ways can be both magical and thought-provoking at the same time.

Born in Norfolk, now based in London, King studied graphic communication design at Central Saint Martins before doing an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art. Different as they may seem, both courses left a profound imprint on his practice. His design education has no doubt been useful when it comes to the planning and construction of his sculptures. More importantly, it has meant that he keeps the functionality and experience of his pieces front of mind, always considering how people will interact with them. “I think a lot about the audience and how the audience will explore the objects, and I think that comes from my design background and always thinking about the user experience,” he says. “I know lots of people, especially artists, who don’t do that. But I always think about how someone seeing the work is going to move around it and how they are going to experience it, which is key.”

29.10.25

Words by Megan Williams

King was chosen by Sarah Staton, the British sculptor and head of the RCA’s Sculpture course, to create the latest installation for BUILDHOLLYWOOD’s Camberwell-based pocket sculpture garden, ‘Dancing in the Shadow of Henry’ in south London. He took the opportunity to dig into the history of the area and create a piece that responds directly to it, which to him is a crucial part of public sculpture. The outcome is a miniature replica of a recreational tent, the kind used for carnivals and fairs, which links to the chequered history of leisure spaces in Camberwell – in particular the Camberwell Fair dating back to the 13th century. “I think taking the tent as the focal point relates a lot to the research I’ve been doing, and it’s a very iconographic building, the circus tent. Everyone knows what it looks like. There’s an emoji for it!” he says. “It’s an emblem of entertainment.”

The piece also aligns with King’s own ongoing research into the architecture and unseen politics of these kinds of entertainment venues – a strand of his practice that has seen him create everything from tiny, intricate versions of seaside piers to scent-based installations conjuring up the feeling of being in a casino. With these pieces and others, he aims to spark people’s curiosity and encourage them to think more deeply about the relationship between physical, social and corporate structures. He hopes that the new installation in Camberwell will reflect these ideas while also serving as a small ‘homage’ to people’s pleasure-seeking ways and their unwavering spirit even in the face of adversity.

As his commission heads to BUILDHOLLYWOOD’s plinth, he talks about the ideas and artists that inform his sculpture practice, and the fascinating inspiration behind his new piece.

Photo credit: Max King

Photo credit: Gert Jan van Rooij

How did you get involved in creating sculpture and artworks based on artefacts?

I started off in fashion communication and then went on to do a degree in graphic communication. Throughout that time I ended up steering away from the traditional screen-based design and print-based design, which is what we were being taught about mainly, and began to experiment in the 3D space a bit more. Thanks to some great tutors there, I managed to embrace the art side and found the work that I wanted to make was in a physical form and in a physical space.

I then spent a year working on my practice after doing BA, making work that was more akin to sculpture, and it just went really well. I hadn’t done a fine art course before, so I was like, OK, I think now it feels like the right time for me to go and push that practice in that sculptural direction, and have people that are more into that realm have a look at the work, rather than just presenting it to designers all the time. The RCA course pushed the work in a really exciting direction.

I still enter projects or artworks in more of a design headspace, and I think throughout my work now, there are still quite strong graphical elements from my background in design, but it’s brought forward in a way that exists more in the area of sculpture.

Are there any artists, movements or reference points that you think have had a strong influence on your work?

It changes depending on what concept I’m looking at, but, for example, a big influence on the area of work I’m currently focusing on, to do with escapism and pleasure and entertainment, are two American artists, Ed and Nancy Kienholz. They used a lot of ready-made, found objects. They had a great show called Roxys, where they basically recreated a waiting room for a brothel. It was this sculptural work that completely changed the perception of those that enter the room, tapping into every single sense and creating this world. The world-building is what I really love throughout their work, everything from works on paper right up to huge, multi-part installations that take over a space. So their work is very influential in the way I tend to think about art. I think visually, I don’t take too many cues from it, but the way that they spoke about art is fascinating.

Where does your artistic interest in leisure and escapism come from?

It’s always been something I think about. I was brought up in Norfolk and one of my favourite weekend activities was to go down to the arcades at Great Yarmouth with my dad. That is something that I have a really vivid, strong memory of, and this whole idea of a constructed environment that is designed to be an escape. We’d go down there and completely lose ourselves in penny arcades and all the ephemera that goes with it – all the sounds, the lights, the food, the smells. It has this resort feel. So thinking about entertainment and pleasure began for me when I was much, much younger.

I find it fascinating to go into these contrived spaces which are designed and engineered to make a person have a particular experience. That includes, as I mentioned, seaside towns. I did a series with piers that come out from the wall, which deals with that fantasy. The pier structure was originally designed to get goods on and off land, so it began as a very industrial piece of architecture, then over time it turned into something that people can monetise, a pleasure pier, and that was something that the elite wanted to tax, so you’d have to pay to go onto the pier. It became a space for people that can afford it, so there was a class disparity.

I’ve also been doing a lot of research about casinos, for example, and how there’s a darker side involving the manipulation of people who are within the space. With all of these buildings, you have the physical structure and then you also have the societal structure that they sit upon.

These ideas relate to the miniature tent installation you’re creating for the BUILDHOLLYWOOD space in south London. Can you tell me about the history and inspiration behind your piece?

The first recorded Camberwell Fair was 1279, and at that time it was a very rural affair. People would travel in and sell their wares and produce. It was less about entertainment and more like a market. Over time, as London was expanding, it became more like a festival, but the local elites in the early 19th century basically saw it as a kind of immoral event. There’s a quote where someone said ‘a horde of nomadic thieves would descend on the green’.

So the upper class people that came into the area basically wanted to shut it down. The way they ended it was essentially buying the land through manorial rights. As soon as they could, they bought the land and shut the fair down. I think some people saw it as a good thing that it was shut down, because of the drunken and the disorderly, and the music and things like that. But how I see it is that it was the end of a vibrant community tradition. It’s a fairly stark reminder of social disciplining.

Then in 2015, it came back as a community fair. It’s taken a long time, but it demonstrates how that reform that they had in 1855 is slowly being undone. So that’s where the idea came from, especially with the plinth being in Camberwell near to the green. There’s a great drawing by George Shepherd titled Camberwell Fair, which depicts a tent very similar to mine in the background, so that’s also where I got this idea of bringing that structure in.

Photo credit: David R Watson

You play with scale quite a lot, in this piece and in your wider practice. Why do you think you’re interested in that?

It works differently depending on which way around it is. With the pin badges, you wear a badge to show what you believe in: music or political ideas, anything like that. It’s a marker of identity. Making the large-scale badges was about stripping the entire badge of its meaning. They were displayed face down. There could be something on the other side, but for the person seeing the work, you don’t see that, so there’s no marker of identity at all. All of the focus is brought to the construction of it, and blowing it up large just allows you to explore that in a more sculptural, exciting way. It turns it into this almost dangerous, sharp object. It’s flipping it on its head.

For the downscaling – with the piers and the tent – it’s about taking these monolithic architectural structures and shrinking them down almost into a scale model form, but the way I do it is not exactly like a scale model, it’s more crafted.

For this Camberwell piece, it made sense to create this tent in a smaller size to be able to sit on the plinth, so it’s like you’re looking into this contrived world that’s behind the fence. I do maintenance on the area, so it’s a plot of land that I know really well. If you’re on the bus, you’ll be able to see that small tent just over the hedge line. Then people can start to conjure up their own ideas: is there anything inside this tent? What’s the story around that? It’s almost magical in a way.

It’s like when you go to a model village, which, again, is a classic trope of a seaside attraction. Walking around, you think you’re a giant, and you’re making all these narratives in your head. It’s a complete shift in perspective, and I think it works really nicely, especially for exploring these huge structures in a more in-depth way.

Photo credit: Max King

Your tent piece is going to be shown outside in the pocket sculpture garden. Can you tell me about how the construction and materials respond to this?

It’s initially constructed with the textile being cut and sewn and constructed around tent poles, and then a casting is done from that. It’s made out of cast aluminium, so when it comes out, it’s going to have a very high shine. It’s going to be treated with a protectant, but over time, it’s still going to change and weather. That’s part of it as well. When I was doing the research on tent designs, often these old canvas tents, especially much further back in time, were weathered, battered, and dirty. They always used to be a bit ropey. It’s only modern circus tents that are more pristine and strong. So that’s why that material has been chosen as well, because it will tarnish very nicely.

It’s not just being made out of worked sheet metal because that would give you much too perfect a finish and too perfect a shape, as it would all have been mathematically calculated. With this, you make the frame, you actually stretch the canvas around, and then the wax casting is going to be able to capture all of the folds and the weave and the stitches. You won’t necessarily see it from a distance, but when you get up close, you should be able to see that it’s more of an organic shape.

It also gives the idea of permanent nonpermanence, which works because, of course, fairs and circuses travel; they’re not there forever. The sculpture not being there forever adds to that. It’s not a permanent installation – it will come down at some point – so it hits that idea of permanence and non-permanence, the same as a fair, in quite a nice way.

Plus it’s nice to be able to present your work in a public way when it’s a public space that you’re referencing as well.

Yeah. I really wanted to do something to do with the area as well. I’m based on the other side of London, but I did want it to be tied to Camberwell. I think that’s quite an important part of public sculpture. I don’t really see much point in a public sculpture that isn’t tied to the place, to be honest. It’s good to have some conceptual tie. For example, in Harlow, they’ve made a sculpture town. The majority of the sculptures there, maybe even all of them but certainly the ones I’ve seen there, relate to the local area, even if the artist is from a thousand miles away.

I wanted this to be something that can really relate to the historical side of people’s lived experiences, and I think with my work being about entertainment and pleasure, that’s all about people’s experiences, isn’t it?

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