Diana Puntar Chimera (H±R-A)

Co-commissioned by Stanley Picker Gallery at Kingston University and the Royal Borough of Kingston for Kingston 2025 festival, which marks the 1100th anniversary of the crowning of King Athelstan, the first King of a United England. Pick up a free guide at one of the main trail venues or visit the Gallery's website to download it. The trail features artworks that explore the transformation of historical objects, such as the Kingston Coronation Stone, into symbols of English heritage, with locations including Kingston University’s Town House Library, Kingston Museum, Frederick W Paine Funeral Museum and All Saints Church. Puntar’s project places new sculptures within existing heritage sites and ongoing community engagement, to question the role of monuments in shaping collective memory and cultural identity. Chimera (H±R-A) begins with a monumental sculptural piece in the entrance hall of Town House Library Kingston University's RIBA Stirling Prize 2021 and the Mies van der Rohe Award 2022 winning building. The work presents a tableau with the Kingston Coronation Stone re-emerging from its Neolithic bedrock, whilst a woolly mammoth-like form slowly sinks into the landscape. This frozen moment presents a possible origin story of Southwest London’s earliest inhabitants… “Where England Began”. Rising from the sculpture is a single post, its bone-like surface etched with text and imagery recalling scrimshaw, the age-old practice of engraving whale bone as a way of marking time and memory across vast oceanic journeys. Puntar will gradually include more engravings on this sculpture, generated through a series of mark-making workshops with underrepresented local communities. Further artworks can be found hidden throughout Kingston, alongside a number of existing heritage sites around the town. ‘Neolithic tools’ of questionable provenance appear within the display cases of the Kingston Museum, a series of ‘funerary talisman’ in the windows of The Frederick W Paine Funeral Museum, and a ‘neolithic relic’ inside All Saints Church. Puntar’s project interrogates hierarchical power structures, challenging the way histories and heritage are constructed, maintained and controlled. By examining who is included and who is excluded from the dominant narrative, the work provides space for alternative perspectives previously marginalised or erased, suggesting that heritage is not static, but an evolving space open to reinterpretation. During your visit to Stanley Picker Gallery also on show is new solo exhibition 'Through an Embodied Practice of Stillness' by Stanley Picker Fellow Davinia-Ann Robinson. Her exhibition presents a series of sculptural installations, soundscapes and film work exploring encounters with stillness through the body’s engagement with somatic practices and raw and reclaimed clay. 'Through an Embodied Practice of Stillness' explores how racial trauma is held within Black and Brown bodies through ancestral, intergenerational and present-day encounters with ‘white-body supremacy’ and how embodied engagements between the body and clay can be conduits for undoing and dismantling racial trauma. Exhibition Open: 16 September - 20 December 2025 Launch event: Saturday 20 September 11am-1pm, FREE All welcome!