Nobody Lives by the Grid is a permanent public art commission by Ivan Morison, developed out of the collaborative practice he shares with Heather Peak. Their work has long treated sculpture as a social instrument, shaping how bodies gather and relate within shared environments. Here, Morison extends that framework through a queer, relational sensibility into a more personal engagement with landscape and public space as lived conditions, structured by intimacy, proximity and unplanned encounter.

Milton Keynes is often described as a city of systems. The grid of roads, the roundabouts, the landscaped corridors: a place planned in advance, drawn from above, rationalised into neighbourhood squares. It carries the legacy of post-war optimism, a belief that good design could engineer a good life.

But nobody actually lives by the grid.

The title emerged from conversations with residents about their everyday journeys. The grid wobbles. It bends to hills, rivers and older traces. Beneath it are other networks: footpaths, cycleways, shortcuts, desire lines, the routes made by bodies moving through space. Beneath those are deeper layers: fishponds, postholes, agricultural marks. Milton Keynes is a palimpsest of arrivals and departures, human and more-than-human life negotiating shared ground.

Installed across four sites along the River Ouzel, the five bronzes establish a sculpture trail within the parkland of Oakgrove. Together, they propose an understanding of public space as an ecology of relations.

In developing the sculptures, Morison became interested in slime moulds. In experiments, slime mould can find routes through a maze towards food without a brain or central command. Its behaviour emerges through sensing and responding to its surroundings. For Morison, this became a powerful counter-image to the ideology of the grid: navigation through relation, intelligence enacted through contact with an environment, ways of moving through public space that are lateral, improvised and intimate, not always legible from above.

The sculptures bring this thinking into the park as companions, guardians and witnesses. Their slightly strange presences enter into relation with those who pass them. On a long granite stage stand The Witness and The Darling: a tall, scarecrow-like figure and its smaller companion, poised somewhere between ritual and play. Nearby, resting on a granite slab that doubles as a bench, sits The Stranger, a green, jelly-like body that invites proximity without explanation. On a column, tendrilled and quietly provocative, stands The Tender Menace. In a more secluded position is The Last to Leave, contracted, inward yet alert.

The sculptures began life in deliberately everyday materials: wildflower meadow hay, balloons, doughnuts, ice-cream cones and coconuts. Materials of parks and parties, of pleasure and accident. Soft, temporary, slightly ridiculous things. These assembled forms were then cast into bronze, a material historically associated with permanence and civic power. Granite slabs and marble stools ground them in geological time.

The works challenge what public sculpture is expected to look like and who it is expected to serve. They adopt the traditional presentation of bronze upon stone, but make that arrangement available for bodily occupation. A plinth can also be a stage; a supporting slab can become a bench. The quality of the making gives lasting substance to forms that remain playful and difficult to categorise.

Each site creates a slightly different spatial condition: a platform to step onto, stools that invite lingering, a companionable space beside a solitary figure. They encourage sitting, waiting, talking, flirting, resting, performing and watching the river flood and recede. They acknowledge that public space is already intimate. Bodies meet there. Memory accumulates there. Cities are choreographed by glances, pauses and return visits as well as by planners.

The commission developed over several years through shared research, conversations and practical work with residents and local schools. Drawing workshops explored the landscape through close observation, while public consultation and collective building sessions examined what sculpture might contribute to shared space. At Oakgrove School, sixth-form students anticipated a cast of imagined characters. Questions of sculptural form were inseparable from questions about where people could gather and what might draw their attention back to their surroundings. Oakgrove Primary School developed a mythic narrative alongside the commission, followed by puppets and a procession through the park to celebrate the opening.

Milton Keynes has a significant history of embedding public art into its development. In a cultural climate where art is increasingly privatised, ticketed or instrumentalised, producing ambitious sculpture for free public access carries a political conviction. It asserts that art can belong to everyone, that it can exist outside the logic of constant monetisation, and that beauty, strangeness and criticality have a place within ordinary civic life.

Nobody Lives by the Grid makes a simple proposal: a city is defined by its relations as much as by its systems. People do not live by diagrams. They live by encounters. By the places they return to. By the small rituals that bind them to landscape and to one another.

If the grid offers order, these sculptures offer connection. And connection, in a time of fragmentation and commodification, is a radical thing.

       

Photographers’ credits       


Chris Henley / Ivan Morison