Dryden Goodwin’s Breathe:2022 – Finale Public Projection
Dryden Goodwin’s Breathe:2022 reached its crescendo at the Lewisham Old Town Hall, Catford – lighting up the night sky for two weeks from 30th November – 18th December 2022.
Produced by Invisible Dust for We Are Lewisham, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan’s London Borough of Culture 2022, Dryden Goodwin’s Breathe:2022 is a multi-site artwork featuring large-scale zoetropic drawings and a large scale video projection of six Lewisham clean air campaigners and residents ‘fighting for breath’ – viewed by over 13 million people to date. A staggering 1,300 of Goodwin’s new drawings of six Lewisham residents and clean air activists are animated in a large-scale public projection on the heavily polluted South Circular Road, on the side of the Old Town Hall, Catford.
Premiering alongside Breathe:2022 is the wonderful Drawing Breath, an ambitious new animation co-created by over 130 Lewisham Secondary School pupils in partnership with the artist. This new project is a collective animation featuring 800 original drawings made by the pupils this autumn, across five participating schools.
It’s free to see this amazing work – Just turn up, it’ll be shown from dusk (4.45pm) till dawn (7am) each night – on until 7am on Sunday 18th December!
This projection is the culmination of our year long programme exploring the impact of air pollution and the power of collective action. Reimagining and extending his 2012 ‘Breathe’ artwork a decade on (which featured 1,300 drawings of his five-year-old son inhaling and exhaling air), Goodwin has created a multi-site commission combining drawings of six Lewisham residents. Participants from local activist groups including Choked Up, Mums for Lungs, Clean Air for Catford, and the Ella Roberta Family Foundation, as well as Goodwin’s now 15 year old son and a younger school child, have been drawn by the Lewisham based artist as they ‘fight for breath’.
Sequences of Goodwin’s delicate small-scale studies have been monumentally scaled-up, appearing as still and moving images on bridges, buildings and digital hoardings close to busy roads across Lewisham, Greater London and parts of the UK since May 2022. Seen by more than 13 million people to date, the work brings home the serious health impacts of air pollution – often disproportionately affecting the most disadvantaged communities.
One featured activist is the tireless campaigner Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, mother of Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, who died in 2013 from an asthma attack in Lewisham. In a 2020, landmark coroner’s judgement found “exposure to excessive air pollution” had contributed to Ella’s death.
