Installations and exhibitions featuring in Illuminate
Illuminate is a ten day creative arts festival celebrating the completion of a six year National Lottery Heritage Fund project in West Norwood Cemetery. This was designed to conserve the Cemetery’s magnificent landscape and architecture, as well as offer new experiences and facilities to increase community use.
Illuminate is proud to feature the following artists who have brought their creativity to this unique arts festival in joint exhibitions, in installations and with work created by the community in many workshops.
Late Night Opening
There will be a Late Night Opening to view all the installations and exhibitions on Monday 2 June, 6pm-9pm, no need to book, please just drop by
Let's start our Illuminate Arts Trail!
Firstly, as you arrive in West Norwood Cemetery look over to your right for:
Art Commission West Norwood Cemetery, a collaboration between Zoë Burt and Allan Brown, Community Shop users and Nature Vibezzz families
Inspired by the moon theme for the opening weekends of the West Norwood Cemetery and by the site surveys conducted on location of trees, wild flowers, insects, moths and butterflies, we designed a textile piece, flags and two mandalas reflecting the biodiversity of this heritage site. These artworks aimed to illustrate the tangible connection between earth, moon, nature and the cycles of all life.
In our workshops with the Community Shop in West Norwood and families connected to the local Nature Vibezzz group, we made cyanotype printed bookmarks and textiles together. These workshops highlighted West Norwood Cemetery and opened up discussions about our complex relationships with places of burial. Alongside a selection of commemorative words inscribed on the grave stones, the participants chose pressed leaves and flowers that had been gathered from the cemetery to design their cyanotype prints, showing that although housing the dead, the cemetery is a place bursting with life, vitality and fascinating history.
Cyanotype is an early form of photography that uses sunlight and water to create unique images. It has a long standing association with documenting nature.
Then as you walk through the famous 'Tite Arch' on your right in front of our new Visitor Centre follow the winding River Effra and the ...
River Effra Fleet, Emma Fenelon
Clay, community, memory
I shaped a fleet of clay boats - vessels to carry memory, meaning, and the quiet weight of being human.
Offered empty to the community, each one was filled with small, tender creations: figures, animals, symbols of what matters. In the act of making together—hands in clay, stories unfolding side by side—a quiet connection formed.
These boats became a shared journey, reflecting how we move through life not alone, but alongside one another. In shaping and filling them together, we honoured the strength of community—the way it holds us, allows for difference, and carries us forward across changing tides.
Next follow the boats into the new Visitor Centre, where you will find the group exhibition:
Curious Lore, curated by Jane Millar
Curious Lore is an exhibition to celebrate the role of artists’ creative practice in uncovering layers of stories, histories, beliefs and customs in West Norwood Cemetery. The works displayed reflect the explosion in material culture in the Victorian era, represented by the burials of extraordinary self-made men and women in the cemetery, and the influx of people from Britain and around the world, to London in the C19th. They brought their skills, customs and folklore with them. Works include ceramics, painting, sculpture, print, textiles and found materials.
The artists are: Fran Burden, Helen Carr, Alison Cooke, Robert Dawson, Diane Eagles, Emma Fenelon, Martin Grover, Tony Hayward and Jane Millar
Now using the map in our new leaflet which you can pick up in the new Exhibition in the Visitor Centre, walk down to St Stephen's Chapel in the Hellenic Enclosure, where you will find silk banners suspended between the chapels huge columns:
Feet in the soil: painting with the sky, Alice MacKenzie
In July of 2023 and September of 2024 people gathered at West Norwood Cemetery for guided plant walks exploring the herbs and trees growing in the nature reserve area of the cemetery. The plant walks were led by cemetery gardener Helen MacKenzie and Maria Cabrera of the South London Botanical Institute, with artist Alice MacKenzie. Along the walks we carefully gathered flowers, leaves and grasses to make a series of silk cyanotype prints - or sun prints - for this collective artwork. Cyanotypes are one of the oldest forms of photography and have a long history with botanical illustrations, dating back to Anna Atkins and her book of Algae and Seaweeds of the British Coast in 1843. Here the prints are collected together by Alice MacKenzie and sewn onto long silk banners that have been dyed with nettles. Nettles are often considered weeds, but have a long and wide history in both medicine and cooking. Nettles dye silk a silver-ivory colour.
And make your way inside St Stephen's Chapel to view the group artists exhibition:
Gathering the Commons, curated by Catherine Morland and Alexandra Warder MacEwen
This exhibition Gathering the Commons brings together a group of artists whose practices explore the intricate relationships between humans, nonhumans, landscapes, and natural materials. Artworks by four artists: Lucy Mayes, Catherine Morland, Marissa Stoffer and Sara Trillo are exhibited in St Stephen’s Chapel, West Norwood Cemetery. A series of talks, events and walks will accompany the exhibition on 7 and 8 June (details here).
The exhibition delves into ecological histories, human-plant relationships, sustainable making and the social significance of handmade traditions. The artists draw on the location of West Norwood Cemetery, particularly its unique ecological features and rich biodiversity shaped by its geology, hydrology, and landscaping.
Then finally make your way up the hill towards the Crematorium and discover the Museum of Moon waiting for you - last entry 10pm.