CRYPT RESIDENCIES 2025: AARAN GREGORY

10-19 May
Open 11am-5pm daily

Aaran is a multi-disciplinary artist and sculptor exploring natural materials and themes

“I am looking to bring my practice back into the urban environment where I was raised. To receive this residency would be a tremendous opportunity to mark my return to the city as a site of ecological inquiry. Here I would aim to create sculptures that use the actual land from the city itself as a medium—working with soil, clay, and natural pigments gathered from London’s terrain. Through this, I want to question where nature exists within the metropolis, what our relationship to the living world looks like in an urban context, and how we might begin to reattune ourselves to it.
In particular, I’ve been searching for a space to create, develop, and test out a new body of raw clay sculptures in response to the city’s shifting material and psychological landscapes. These rammed earth forms would be cast using a mould I have previously built but have yet to activate. The residency would also provide a vital opportunity to screen my EarthBody film series- a growing collection of works that explore the entanglements between body, land, and memory. Alongside the screenings, I intend to develop a new film within the city, documenting my discoveries whilst working there. This film would become part of the ongoing series and be shared through future festivals and exhibitions focused on ecology, reciprocity, and sustainability.

Finally, The Crypt’s distinctive architecture and acoustic qualities offer an ideal space for collaborative, interdisciplinary exploration. I envision using the residency to further develop Sensing Earth Space, my performance-based project involving dancers and sound artists, as we respond collectively to the materiality and atmosphere of place. The Crypt is an ideal space for this work precisely because of its layered material and historical presence. As a former burial chamber now reactivated as an art space, it embodies a convergence of life, death, memory, and transformation—all themes central to my practice. Its subterranean architecture, composed of exposed brick, stone, and earth, echoes the raw materials I work with—soil, clay, and natural pigments— creating a powerful dialogue between site and sculpture. The atmosphere of the underground space offers not only a meditative stillness but also a sense of being physically and metaphorically rooted in the ground, making it a resonant space to explore urban ecology, embodied land, and our relational ties to place. It becomes more than a backdrop—it becomes an active collaborator. All work produced would become a record of the lands archaeology in real time.”

More info: Aaran Gregory