Seeds of Change brings together Soft & Fragile, a three-metre inflatable head of The Pink Bear, and dozens of hand-cast Seed Heads at Winter Sculpture Park 2025 in Thamesmead, London. The project is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
From 1 March to 26 April 2025, Seeds of Change develops the head of The Pink Bear as a recurring form within LUAP’s Sculpture practice. Across the rewilded landscape of the former Thamesmead Golf Course, the same recognisable form appears at radically different scales and in materials that behave in very different ways.
At the centre is Soft & Fragile. At three metres high, the inflatable Sculpture rises beyond human scale and commands attention within the open landscape. The work follows The Pink Bear Pavilion in Hamburg, where the head became a monumental architectural structure large enough to enter. Here, that form is reworked through air and fabric. Its physical presence remains substantial, but the material introduces a very different kind of vulnerability.
Around it are dozens of Seed Heads, small enough to hold in the hand. Each is made individually and contains wildflower seeds, with the Sculptures designed to break apart after being placed in the landscape. As their forms deteriorate, the seeds are released into the soil.
The repeated head does not simply reproduce the same object at different sizes. Scale, material and function change what each version can become. The Pavilion can be entered. Soft & Fragile depends on air to maintain its volume. The Seed Heads are made to lose their form completely.
“The seed heads reflect how we might feel fragile or broken, but also hold the potential for something to grow. Sometimes things need to fall apart before they come together.”
LUAP
The former golf course is already undergoing its own process of rewilding, giving the work a setting in which change is physically taking place rather than simply represented. The Seed Heads gradually become part of that landscape, with the wildflower mix developed alongside local people working to support bees and other pollinators in the area.
Local residents are also invited to make Seed Heads of their own, extending the repeated form beyond the studio. Some are planted within the park while others are taken elsewhere, allowing the work to disperse through different hands and locations.
In Seeds of Change, the head of The Pink Bear shifts from monument to inflatable form and finally to something small enough to disappear into the ground. Repetition becomes a way of testing what the same image can hold when its scale, material and permanence are changed.
