Heather and Ivan Morison set out to create furniture that will lift your thinking: simple, subversive, powerful and useful. Designed and made with careful thought and considered form and shape, the street furniture will encourage, nudge and suggest places to sit, to meet, for conversation, coffee, reading, play, small gatherings, game playing and rest.

The design and material of the street furniture here, is Becontree-specific, with material qualities and colour combinations borrowed from the surroundings to create a celebratory collage of the everyday textures and shades of the estate. The playful furniture is intended to celebrate and encourage a diversity of social behaviour, which is designed to encourage new ways of being still, being social and being present. The furniture has been developed from material mixes from rubble collected from a demolition site on the Estate, to make an environmentally-responsible and context-responsive upcycled cast concrete.

STUDIO MORISON founders Heather Peak Morison and Ivan Morison have worked together as an artist duo since 2003, establishing a significant collaborative practice that transcends the divisions between art, architecture and theatre, and acts in collaboration with many other areas of creativity and local communities.

STUDIO MORISON have produced major works for many British art institutions, including Tate Modern; exhibited widely across Europe, North America and Australasia; and represented Wales at the 52nd Venice Biennial. Their work is held in many collections around the world.

Recent projects include I Will Be With You, Whatever (BISS, Munich DE, 2018); Cetaceans (Natural History Museum, London, 2017); Sleepers Awake (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney AU, 2014); All’s Well That Ends (Schauspielhaus Bochum, DE 2014); Smile All the While (Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2014); Shadow Curriculum (South London Gallery, 2014); Skirt of the Black Mouth (Tate Modern, London, 2012-15); Nuclear Family (National Theatre of Wales, 2013). Their book, Falling into Place, was published by Bookworks in 2009, and was made into an audio book by Palaver Press, New York in 2014