Verity-Jane Keefe














The Alcove Museum, 2022
The Moorings Sociable Club
A new museum in two alcoves in the Great Hall / The Alcove Museum shares moments from the buildings past and places it alongside the new layers of repair and care that have been inserted and added across the building. When I was AiR I removed all of the existing No Ball Games and other redundant signs, as they felt outdated and negative, working with Peabody’s ground team. Some of these signs are shown here, sharing a slice of history from the mid 70’s to now, and the different layers of ownership over time. Original snooker balls collected from my first visit, carpet from the former bar, the original sign updated, miniature people as portrait of participation, and a book presented by original architect Stephen Mooring to Peabody with original drawings, sketches, membership cards and photos.
Dimensions 5 metres x 2.3 metres x 80cm depth, Archival materials, hardwood, emulsion, Perspex, miscellaneous signs, aluminium rods, lights, ventilation covers.
LAHP Practice-Led PhD
Supporting Images
1
“And the mineral, glistening in her protected hand, told her to give up”, 2023
The power was too much and the collection would never reveal its secrets, not without extracting more and more energy from her. The carved chicken in marble form looked on whilst its chicks blissfully ignored the scenes unfolding. The material of the struggle, the body giving up again and again and again across the house.
Performances at Hospitalfield as part of the interdisciplinary residency programme, featuring fake deaths of the artist and the anthropomorphising of the mineral collection as an exploration and display of power.
Artist body, Hospitalfield House Arbroath, Minerals from the collection, various dimensions.
2
Threshold, Lived in Architecture, 2021 - 2022
Royal Institute of British Architects, Architecture Gallery, Artist Commissioned solo show.
Inserting a fragment of Becontree material palette in front of the listed entrance of the Architecture Gallery.
The show takes as it’s starting point Completion - can a place ever be finished, with all of the living, breathing, customisations and individual choices that are made over 100 years of post-occupancy. Most noticeable in Becontree following the Right to Buy but there long before this. As a way to think of the next 100 years of a place, made up of almost 100,000 lives being lived and played out day by day. Working with residents to reconstruct fragments of customisation, as scenography and a tribute to the individual.
The exhibition emerged from a sixteen year period of returning, of close looking and developing relationships and collecting fragments of place, through photography, film and sculptural works - archived to present new taxonomies of a slice of a place at a particular time.
Timber scenographic flat, fake brick fibreglass moulded cladding, black ceramic special tiles, paint, concrete weights, 2.5 metres x 1.2 metres x 75cm depth.
3
A Palace-Like Cottage, roaming texts and columns, Lived in Architecture, 2021 - 2022
Royal Institute of British Architects, Architecture Gallery, Artist Commissioned solo show.
“I’m not interested in art” she said, “Oh, but I love your columns” The door flings open and she gesticulates “”Babe I love my columns” A reconstruction of number 26 and said columns, with one of the roaming poetic statements that are dotted around the exhibition, taken from archival material from RIBA Collections.
The show takes as it’s starting point Completion - can a place ever be finished, with all of the living, breathing, customisations and individual choices that are made over 100 years of post-occupancy. Most noticeable in Becontree following the Right to Buy but there long before this. As a way to think of the next 100 years of a place, made up of almost 100,000 lives being lived and played out day by day. Working with residents to reconstruct fragments of customisation, as scenography and a tribute to the individual.
Fibreglass columns, 30cm x 30cm x 2.2 metres as part of porch (out of shot), pebbledash, vinyl text applied to marble, 3cm x 35cm
4
“Aggregate like a semi-precious sculptural object found separated from the road surface it was once part of”, 2021
1 of 9 billboards commissioned as part of Living Together across the public realm on the Becontree Estate, Dagenham.
The public realm exhibition made visible some of the objects collected as part this long term project. The work intends to reflect the material of the place including building matter and archival political material. This new archive - The Becontree Collection - brings together material from the last 100 years, collected from individuals, through a long period of public engagement and from Keefe’s long-term documentation of the estate.
Living Together was a major art commission celebrating the centenary of the Becontree estate in Barking and Dagenham and culminates Keefe’s many years of work in and about the estate. It looked at the past 100 years of social housing through the lens of Becontree, which was once the largest social housing estate in the world; looking at its past, the present and into the future.
Digital print, 1.2m x 1.8m
5
“Brick, Green Splatter. Millions of bricks beneath every pebbledashed crazy paved or mock Tudor wall”, 2021
2 of 9 billboards commissioned as part of Living Together across the public realm on the Becontree Estate, Dagenham.
Digital print, 6m x 3m
6
Banjo on The Banjo, 2019
Banjo: a round ended pedestrian cul-de-sac native to the Becontree Estate. BANJO ON THE BANJO was a musical performance event located on various banjos across Dagenham’s Becontree Estate culminating in Parsloes Park, as part of Living Together.
The event marked the 100 year anniversary of the Addison Act (31 July 1919); which gave London County Council powers to build council housing beyond London, signalling the birth of Becontree and the start of a long tradition of state-owned housing, which would later evolve into council estates.
40 banjo players performed a new composition for Becontree. Following an open call for both unwanted banjos, banjo players and residents wanting to learn how to play the banjo, people who live and work across Becontree learnt to play the banjo with musician and teacher Ed Hicks, and then performed a new piece of music, written by Ed Hicks in
response to the banjos of Becontree and the estate itself. The performances were both individual, on the architectural banjos, and a collective performance in Parsloes Park.
Commissioned by Create London.
7
From Social to Sociable, 2023
This is a book by Verity-Jane Keefe that offers a slice of a place in time, a five-and-half, six-year window into a place, its residents, and a building. It centres around care and relationships. What it is to breathe new life into a building that has existing histories? What is the role and potential of the artist working within regeneration? How can we work with communities to make things public?
At its heart this is a book that documents and demystifies process – not as a traditional case study of a project, but an honest open conversation between the client and commissioner, Kate Batchelor and Lead Artist on the Design Team, Verity-Jane Keefe.
This is not a guidebook on how to do things, nor is it a manual for suggested best practice. It is an archaeology and atlas of a building and a project, which is both the backdrop and protagonist, and collaborative processes between a client trying to do things differently and an artist finding herself working within architecture to positively disrupt how “regeneration” might be done (slowly). It is an artwork, and a container of process and practice.
Commissioned and Published by Peabody
8
ALL THE BEST FOR THE FUTURE, 2022
The Moorings Sociable Club
Installed on to the railings of the West Terrace of the Moorings Sociable Club , based on a paper poster I had found in 2018 in the derelict building, on the floor of the former children’s nursery downstairs, drawn in chalk pen. Conceived as an artwork and sign for the building, to welcome the next chapter of its lifecycle.
Works made whilst Lead Artist on the Design Team for the refurbishment of The Moorings Sociable Club, leading the collaborative, community focussed process and installing a series of creative works in response to this across and around the building. The building had been derelict for 15 years, this role and project grew out of my previous role as artist in residence for The Moorings with Peabody.
The building re-opened on March 12th 2022 as the Moorings Sociable Club (name chosen via a resident’s competition).
Dimensions 11 metres x 0.8 metres, 3mm laser cut aluminium, powder coated and welded to the railings.

Three Curtains and infill flooring, 2022
The Moorings Sociable Club
Three new curtains in the Great Hall. The old windows of the building were covered in the residue of decades of sellotape marks, peeling off and layered up. The pattern of the curtains is taken from these shapes, made collaboratively with residents. Infill flooring: Instead of replacing all the floor, a new layer proposed as insert into the gaps of damaged original 1970’s parquet in The Great Hall, caused by a decade of rain drips and leaking. Made with Foresso, the stripped-out wood was categorised and shipped to them where it was chipped and bound in bio-resin.
Curtains: fire resistant canvas, digitally printed, 8 metres x 2.6 metres, three sets. Flooring: Green bio resin, stripped out damaged salvaged wood from across the building, chipped and bound, various dimensions across an area of 11 metres x 2.5 metres.
9
A Thamesmead Hoarding, 2020
A photographic collage of The Moorings, Thamesmead Stage 3 as new hoarding in front of the Moorings Social Club for the duration of its refurbishment.
As a culmination of artist in residence period with Peabody in Thamesmead and ongoing role as artist on the Design Team for the reopening of the former social club, a staged photograph showing all of the life and people within the community that I had been working with for the previous four years. Every person and group was photographed individually, at their home or workplace, and then photo collaged into the space, The Great Hall, which is directly behind the hoarding. As a way to subvert usual regeneration hoardings that sell a lifestyle, this communicates a portait of what is, and could be, when the building opens. Photographed with some of the residents and collaborators, socially distanced in 2020.
Digitally printed dibond, mounted on wooden baton frame, 10.83m x 2.88m
10
Ford, Work, Leisure, 2016
Whilst borough Artist in Residence for Barking and Dagenham, I was invited to document the demolition of the Ford Stamping Plant. Whilst there I developed a series of social sculptures out of the demolition material, including a new temporary outdoor canteen and smoking area, from tables and chairs from the former canteen. For the new temporary community of demolition workers that adhered to practical health and safety requirements.
Table and chairs, freestanding ash tray, four sections of heras fencing, fencing feet, 3.5 metres x 2 metres approximately.
11
The Mobile Museum, 2014 - 2017
The Mobile Museum was an ex local authority mobile library 2001 Ford Iveco. The vehicle was transformed into an itinerant museum that toured the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham’s twelve remaining purpose built council estates, collecting, making, gathering and responding along the way, and constructing a new speculative natural history collection made with residents of the borough.
The architecture of the vehicle, and then perhaps equally important the design, in form and content, of the public programme, devising workshops, archaeological digs, talks, walks and more, in response to the particularl context of the specific estate or location.
Interior built by me with assistants, I got my lorry license so I could drive it. ACE funded, I lost £10k match funding from the council in local authority cuts, which I then raised via kickstarter.
Dimensions of a standard Ford Iveco Mobile Library, 6.1 metres x 2.5 metres, reclaimed hardwood parquet, MDF, acrylic, various materials for the collection.
The Mobile Museum, Interior, 2017
Interior view showing vitrines and objects from the newly made collection – including a borough wide aggregate survey.
Dimensions of a standard Ford Iveco Mobile Library, 6.1 metres x 2.5 metres, reclaimed hardwood parquet, MDF, acrylic, various materials for the collection.
12
Legoland, (site specific film screening), 2015
Legoland is a cinematic portrait of Goresbrook Village in Dagenham. The film explores the hidden life of a 55 year old council estate, affectionately known as Legoland locally, using it’s demolition as a backdrop to explore the wider context of regeneration. The screening occurred within the invisible footprint of Dunmow House whilst it was a construction site of the new development, Castle Green Place.
Since demolition, I worked with ex-residents and staff of the estate to carefully construct a narrative soundtrack of the estate, the local area and the complex subject of housing. The work has been shot on high definition and filmed over a two year period. It includes footage from the demolition process, the derelict interiors, the construction of the new development and show home.
The demolition process is used to frame the social narratives of both the site and Dagenham as a wider area in the midst of change.
Dimensions variable, scaffolding tower constructed for screen, 5m x 3m. Show home transformed into temporary museum to the site.