Wren is a visual artist and an environmental activist at heart.

She works across the arts, bringing her visual aesthetics, movement, photography and art together to create extraordinary moments and spaces. Her practice is deeply reflective and ecological, combining inner and outer landscapes.

Wren predominantly works on a large scale, reflecting her desire to share both the experience of creativity and her work with others. She will invite interaction with a piece through a reflection, a surprise or sense encounter and often through community involvement in the conception and making of artworks.

Wren is fascinated by space, light and colour and the beneficial effects this has upon humans. Her works are often sited in the landscape: suggested routes between them are created to encourage outdoor journeys, and moments of awareness and wonder.

The materials she uses are carefully chosen to do as little damage to the earth as possible, often a combination of waste material or the earth itself.

Artistic background and experience

Wren was born into a large family in Shropshire and brought up on the beautiful and wild Longmynd, by her painter and ceramic artist- educator parents. Here she was steeped in the rural environment, and art, and encouraged in her love of music and dance.

After studying Design BA Hons at Middlesex University, she joined the Greenham Common Peace Camp and was involved in non-violent direct action.In 1989 she cycled across Europe along the major rivers to highlight water pollution for Greenpeace.

Wren is an Environmental Artist, with over twenty years experience working in many ways with people: creating outdoor performances, celebrations, trails, films, sculptures, gardens and eco spaces. These are places in which to reflect on the nature of life and our relationship to the world.

She has also been involved in improving indoor environments and health settings for children and has completed a number of celebrated large scale public art commissions.

In this time she has become an instigator, an ideas person and a developer of initiatives and ways of engaging people in the Arts.

I make large temporary sculptures from old books, which I collected from the public in the UK. The sculptures vary in size, from approximately 1 metre cubed to 120 metres long. After the books are metamorphosed into a temporary sculptural form, they are carefully dismantled and redistributed.

What inspired me? Timbuktu, Mali.

My first book sculpture, a 120 metre long Remembrance Labyrinth I designed, was made using old books for the labyrinth walls. In a collaboration with Ray Jacobs, I felt that i wanted to make the walls from books after visiting Timbuktu and hearing a description that thousands of manuscripts had been built into the walls of homes in an attempt to hide precious libraries from invaders. This resonated with me – having just inherited a veritable library from my artist parents, and as a student of sustainable architecture looking for ways to make carbon friendly artwork.

The resulting Labyrinth artwork was as much about the collection of the 7000 used books, gathered from the local community, as the creation of it with local volunteers and the books distribution afterwards. All the books used in the Labyrinth went directly to charities after the installation was dismantled, including Oxfam, The Severn Hospice and The Princes Trust.

Later sculptures included the Drink Deep Oxfam Book sculpture at my solo exhibition called ‘Meetings in the Middle of Somewhere’, in Walsall.

At Wenlock Poetry Festival I made live book sculptures with festival visitors who brought donations of books with them.

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