Two Cannibals Eating a Clown is a distributed work comprising benches, tables, stools and circular seating installed across the Becontree Estate. Six sculptural groupings occupy previously overlooked sites around neighbourhood shopping parades, creating places to sit, wait, meet, eat, talk, play or watch the life of the estate pass by.

The project began with an absence. Although Becontree was one of the most ambitious municipal housing developments of the twentieth century, its extensive landscape of houses, gardens, roads and green space provided relatively few civic squares or informal gathering places. During his first visit, Morison became conscious of the power of public space through experiencing its lack.

Rather than proposing a central monument, he developed a network of small interventions beside shops, junctions, crossings and everyday routes through the estate. These “micro-islands” transform places of passing into places of being.

The furniture is composed from an elementary vocabulary of cones, cylinders, hemispheres, circles and slabs. A cylinder placed upon a cone becomes a table. A horizontal slab supported by a smaller slab becomes a bench. Small hemispheres positioned on the furniture are known as coconuts. Recombined across the estate, these forms give each site an individual character while maintaining a relationship between them.

Their simplicity recalls children’s wooden building blocks. Some benches face one another; others form protective circles around trees. Tables and stools allow groups to gather and disperse, while smaller elements invite play. The orientation and distance between the forms create a subtle social choreography, influencing how bodies meet without prescribing what must happen.

The material language was developed directly from Becontree. Rubble collected from a demolition site on the estate was incorporated into new precast concrete, allowing matter removed from one location to return in another form. The aggregates reflect the estate’s brickwork, pebble-dashed houses, paving, roof tiles and weathered surfaces.

Horizontal seating and table surfaces were polished to reveal a fine terrazzo of cream, pink, grey and orange stone, while their supporting elements received a darker, coarser finish. As the concrete weathered, rain, moss, staining, scuffs and repeated use drew the pieces further into the material life of the estate. Morison described them as “new old works, sitting in solidarity with their situation”.

The title introduces another register. Two Cannibals Eating a Clown takes its name from a joke associated with Tommy Cooper. One cannibal turns to the other and asks, “Does this taste funny to you?” Absurd, economical and unexpectedly dark, the joke is assembled from familiar elements whose combination produces something stranger. The title resists the worthy language that can surround public art and civic design, giving the work an identity that cannot be fully explained by its function.

“Is there a direct connection between this title, this work and this place? I think there is, but it is mysterious.”
Ivan Morison, 2023

First proposed in 2020, the project developed through conversations with residents, local businesses and the commissioning partners. These discussions helped identify where places to rest and gather were needed. The works do not illustrate those conversations but respond to them spatially through their location, scale and invitation to use.

Create London Director Marie Bak Mortensen described the wider ambition of the commission as the creation of:

“Generous and bold infrastructure that responds to civic needs, local contexts and environmental concerns.”

Several months after the installation, Morison returned to spend time at the different sites. People waited to use a cashpoint, rested after shopping, smoked, talked, ate together or fed their children. Workers sat together at the end of the day, while children ran around circular benches and adults watched from nearby tables.

No programme was required to activate the work. Its social sculpture existed within these unannounced and largely unrecorded encounters. Each person temporarily altered the composition, adding another body, action or relationship. The sites were not uniformly peaceful or picturesque. Some were pressed against busy roads or enclosed by railings. The works encountered traffic, rain, litter, food packaging and the other traces of intensely used civic space. Their value came partly from remaining open and useful within these conditions.

“This is a hard place to put works of art, so hard perhaps that we need to disguise them as benches and stools.”
Ivan Morison, personal reflections on Two Cannibals Eating a Clown, 2023

This disguise is central to the work. Seen from a distance, a grouping may appear to be an abstract sculpture or an inexplicable arrangement of forms. Approached and occupied, it becomes useful furniture. Through repeated use, it recedes into the estate, becoming less an object to be viewed than part of the infrastructure through which daily life is supported.

The work asks what kinds of attention and expenditure ordinary public spaces deserve. Care is expressed through the materials, distinctive forms and decision to place them where people already conduct their lives. Their quality communicates that these modest corners, and those who occupy them, merit thought, skill and investment.

A bench invites someone to remain where they might otherwise be expected to keep moving. A table makes eating and conversation visible. A circular seat brings strangers into proximity without requiring interaction. Through these small permissions, the work expands what can take place in shared space.

During one return visit, a child passing a newly installed grouping told her mother, “Look, now we have another lovely place to sit.” The remark describes the work precisely. Its sculptural ambition and civic function are inseparable. Without the intervention there was simply pavement; with it came an invitation to rest and meet.

Two Cannibals Eating a Clown occupies the unstable territory between artwork, furniture and public infrastructure. It is permanent, but its form continues to be completed through bodies, weather, wear and use. Across the estate, its separate arrangements create a larger sculptural space, made active through the ordinary acts of sitting down and being together.

       

“After a rain shower, water puddles on the stools and tabletops. The fine pebbles within the polished surfaces are pink, grey and orange, set against a finely speckled cream. They match the varying tones of brick in the surrounding houses and the occasional pebble-dashed wall. Roof tiles are darkened by yellow-green lichen; mortar gathers moss where it is damp; cast gateposts wear away to reveal the large stones used as aggregate. These are the colours and materials of this place, colours that come from age. These are new old works, sitting in solidarity with their situation.

“We return together another day. It has been raining, but the sun is out now. We stop at the Lithuanian supermarket on the corner and buy things for lunch. A man sits on the circular bench, still, waiting for time to pass. We set out our food on one of the small tables: pickled cucumbers, salads, dark rye bread and roasted potatoes, arranged around the funny green hemisphere at its centre.

“We eat and talk about the places the tastes remind us of. An Irish woman asks if we want to buy a couple of pillows. The man wanders off and returns with another Strongbow. A woman passes with two young children. ‘Look Mum, now we have another lovely place to sit,’ says the girl.

“It is nice sitting here on this busy corner, with the traffic waiting at the lights, opposite Argos, the Premier Inn and Kevin’s Corner second-hand fridge store. It really is.”

Ivan Morison, Two Cannibals Eating a Clown: Personal Reflections, 6 November 2023

Photographers’ credits       


Installation images_Thierry Bal / Ivan Morison