public engagement
Our Public Engagement programme imagines a future in which radical systemic and structural change improves the lived experience of our cities at a time of unprecedented climate change. The programme aims to nurture greater empathy for diverse sensory experiences of urban heat islands, illuminating how the melting metropolis has arisen from value-systems and behaviour patterns that privilege the few.
Image credit: www.albertoromano.co.uk, Stand of the Sun performance, 2025
What we are DOING:
Public engagement runs adjacent to academic research and community engagement, extending Melting Metropolis’ research findings beyond the hyper-local.
Led by Research Artist Bryony Ella, our interdisciplinary programme seeks to inspire urbanites to consider diverse, multi-dimensional, lived experiences of heat in the city through a focus on embodied memory and sensory-led storytelling.
By situating past and present lived experiences of communities most impacted by urban heat islands within wider, public-realm conversations, the public engagement programme amplifies voices typically marginalised in regional, national, and global discourse about topics such as climate justice and urban development.
L: Stand of the Sun performance, London 2025, photographer Alberto Romano, R: Drawing Heat walk, New York 2024, photographer Martina Colova.
recent projects
Stand of the Sun is a live performance where environmental history meets the wonder of celestial interconnectedness. Integrating choreography inspired by Western and Caribbean flow with harmonic invocations inspired by nature, it offers a new ritual amid climate chaos. First performed as part of the Richmond Arts and Ideas Festival and the Cultural Reforesting programme at Orleans House Gallery in London, Stand of the Sun brings different creative disciplines together to respond to our ongoing research in London, New York and Port of Spain, Trinidad.
Devised and directed by our Research Artist Bryony Ella, this free public event invites audiences to observe our cities through the solar gaze, exploring the deeply uncanny and uncertain nature of our celestial relationship today. Activating imaginations and our ability to empathise with an entity so different to ourselves yet intertwined with our fate, Stand of the Sun is an immersive and embodied dialogue with our closest star. Together we wonder, what would the Sun say to humanity if only we could listen? How does the Sun experience our over-heating world? What does it feel like to move through our too-hot cities and heat-stroked bodies?
The performance is in conversation with Ella's sculpture My Body is a Sundial (read more on the installation below).
stand of the sun
creative team
With thanks to the following team who developed and performed ‘Stand of the Sun’ at Orleans House Gallery in Twickenham, London, June 2025:
Antoine Marc: Choreographer & dancer
Aron Kyne: Sound designer
Austin Tang: Lighting technician
Bryony Ella: Director, spoken word, sculpture & lyrics
Bumi Thomas: Composer, voice, lyrics & guitar
Carlene Etienne: Steel pan
Clare Hirst: Flute & saxophone
Cosimo Keita: Percussion
Elixir: Sound healing & ambient soundscape
Emmanuel Clem: Voice
Han Sayles: Production electrician
Kieron Daniel: Cello
Joanna Penso: Producer
Max Rademacher: Ngoni, voice & guitar
Miles Danso: Upright bass
Olia Poliakova: Dancer
Pharoah Russell: Drums
Rachel Sampley: Lighting designer
Renako McDonald: Dancer
Robert Dunkley-Gyimah: Dancer
Rose Aida Sall Sao: Dancer
Sade Alleyne: Dancer
Tomi Allen-Nurse: Jewellery designer
Vincenzo Capodivento: Sound engineer
Photographs by Alberto Romano www.albertoromano.co.uk
Image: My Body is a Sundial by Bryony Ella at Orleans House Gallery, photo © Ewelina Ruminska, 2025
my body is a sundial
Building upon her own autoethnography and Drawing Heat research, Bryony Ella has built a sculptural installation that explores her own relationship to the sun through embodied drawing and painting. It considers the body as a record of solar intensity, engaging the sun in dialogue as it visits the project’s research cities (and the artist’s ancestral lands) of London, New York, and Port of Spain, Trinidad. My Body is a Sundial is on display in the Cultural Reforesting exhibition at Orleans House Gallery in London until 31 August 2025.
About the artwork:
My Body is a Sundial is a conversation between two bodies held too close. Human and celestial bodies, ricocheting, raging and merging between hot cities of glass, asphalt and steel. The sculpture invites visitors to step inside the organic, ancestral, sensorial container of the artist, suspended between the rejection and recovery of her relationship with our closest star.
Around the world, heat is fast becoming the leading cause of weather-related deaths; our bodies have not evolved to live in cities that are perfectly designed to entrap the sun, and the impacts of extreme temperatures are not felt equally. Inspired by the environmental history research project Melting Metropolis, the artwork is a search for embodied understandings and expressions of how the sun shapes us, and how we shape the sun in return.
“As the heart of our solar system moves through my mid-afternoon body, a body that dreams of dawn as dusk draws closer, the intense pressures of heat, clock-time, uncanny seasons and narrow sightlines of how to live well, here, now, surface. Yet, subtle movements and minute noticings stir here, too. Re-membering ancestral patterns. Rescuing childhood awe. Stirring empathy for a body that is also trapped in these cities, and also fuel for systems distorting evolutionary cycles.” - Bryony Ella
My Body is a Sundial expresses the bodily-felt tension between yearning to live in a state of reverence and respect for sun, and the very real danger of living within cities that are perfectly designed to entrap its heat.
Memories and desires colour the present, articulating both the pleasures and pressures of living with the sun, while fleeting moments of clarity illuminate the bright intensity of solar time, wisdom and warning. We are holding the Sun too close, and yet we need the Sun, we evolved with the Sun, our bodies contain the Sun. Can we find new ways, or old ways, of being in relationship with our closest star?
Image: My Body is a Sundial by Bryony Ella at Orleans House Gallery, photo © Ewelina Ruminska, 2025
Drawing Heat
Over two summers we delivered a series of public events in Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan in collaboration with Queens Memory Project (2023 and 2024) and Asia Society (2024). These Drawing Heat ‘walk-shops’ brought art and history together to offer embodied practices to illuminate how, where and why the urban heat island has emerged and to encourage participants to consider different dimensions to our relationship to the sun.
Drawing exercises focused attention on how our bodies absorb the different qualities of the environment, while historical archives brought to life the people and the politics behind the shaping of our cities from 1945 to the present day.
Drawing Heat continues to be developed and shared as the research project grows.
Artist Research:
Alongside community and academic research, Bryony Ella is conducting her own creative research in relation to the academic research themes:
the convergences and contrasts between the cities,
the historical relationship between heat, health and climate justice,
how historians, geographers, artists and communities equitably work together to develop new understandings of urban heat.
Her studio practice specifically asks:
how has our treatment, relationship and perception of the sun changed on either side of the Atlantic over centuries of human development?
What are the power dynamics between natural climate patterns and human behaviour patterns that impact upon human health?
What shape does embodied ecology as a creative methodology take when it intersects historical research and is grounded in the lived experience of urban environments?
Image: Bryony Ella with ‘My Body is a Sundial’ sculpture, London 2025, photographer: Ewelina Ruminska