Centenary Artist Residency Celebrating the Hampstead Heath Ladies’ Pond

XAP artist Laura Dekker has been selected as an Artist in Residence at the Ladies’ Pond on Hampstead Heath in London, as part of its Centenary celebrations. From Autumn Equinox 2025 to Autumn Equinox 2026, she will be exploring the Pond as a place of transformation and sublimation, celebrating its profound importance in the lives of thousands of women and girls who have swum there over the century. In this experimental residency, she will explore the Heath’s iron-bearing water, extracting coloured compounds and fibres from the surrounding flora, harnessing electricity from the microbial life in the mud, to construct and power delicate kinetic structures. It will be a residency of play and alchemy!