Join local artist Lola Lely for a tour of her new installation, Aberfeldy Stories: Colours of Home. On this free tour, organised to celebrate the launch of the installation as part of London Craft Week 2023, Lely will take participants on a walk around the exterior and interior locations of her banners which are currently enlivening Aberfeldy Village in Poplar. Made of hemp cloth screen-printed with natural dyes, this project is pioneering in its embrace of techniques that seek to minimise environmental impact.

The work was created using a colour palette of natural dyes developed in free community workshops held in Aberfeldy last year. Lely has worked with a range of collaborators, producing the banners through low-waste, hyper-localised processes. The results are both beautiful and inspiring, with motifs inspired by natural and architectural features of the local area. The thoughtful design and the experimental processes involved not only demonstrate Lely’s achievements as a maker whose work focuses on interconnection between the natural world and material culture, but also provides an opportunity to reflect on the inherent sustainability of large-scale public art installations, providing a model of how these could be achieved differently in the future.