The People’s Forest: The Fairlop Oak

Gayle Chong Kwan’s monolithic 11-metre high sculpture The Fairlop Oak, takes root in the Barbican, towering up through three floors into the ground floor foyers. The hybrid contemporary-historical installation draws together new, natural and man-made materials, with scores of small model houses created from waste packaging sitting atop felled branches from Epping Forest.

The Fairlop Oak is part of “The People’s Forest”, an ambitious two-year investigation by Chong Kwan into the politics, history of protest, and people of London’s ancient woodland, Epping Forest. Chong Kwan explores the forest as a site of shared and contested resources, conflict between capital and common, private and public, and as a threshold between rural and urban.