10Foot’s First Sculpture Confronts the Politics of Enclosure

For an artist whose name has become embedded across London’s railway lines, rooftops and overlooked architecture, 10Foot’s first sculpture feels closely connected to a practice already shaped by access, restriction and the contested spaces of the city. Created for CRIMINAL: An Untold History of Homelessness, Resistance and Survival at the Museum of Homelessness in Finsbury Park, Faerie Newbuild places a living hawthorn tree inside a skip-shaped structure made from steel Palisade fencing, bringing together two very different forms of boundary: one organic and historic, the other industrial and unmistakably contemporary.

Speaking with Museum of Homelessness co-directors Matt and Jess Turtle, 10Foot described a life surrounded by fences, from gardens and railway lines to barbed wire and electric security systems, wondering whether future generations might look back upon our era as “The Fence Age.” For a graffiti writer whose practice has repeatedly involved crossing the physical limits imposed upon the city, the idea carries particular force. Rather than passing through or over the barrier, Faerie Newbuild makes the barrier itself the focus.

10Foot has created his first-ever sculpture Faerie Newbuild. Image: Toby Goodyear and Joss Fenn. Read the full article in the BIG ISSUE here.

Faerie Newbuild: enclosure, folklore and the boundary

The hawthorn at the centre of the sculpture gives the work a deeper historical and folkloric dimension. Before contemporary fencing, hawthorn was widely used to create boundaries around land, while British and Irish folklore also associated the tree with faeries and thresholds between the ordinary world and something beyond it. World of Interiors describes the work as bringing the history of enclosure into contact with what it calls modern Britain’s obsession with security, while 10Foot himself speaks of hawthorn as both an ancient form of fencing and a tree with a supernatural identity.

That combination prevents the work from settling into a single reading. The tree may appear protected, imprisoned or deliberately placed beyond reach, while the title Faerie Newbuild brings folklore into contact with the language of property development and contemporary construction. What appears at first to be a relatively simple structure becomes a study of how boundaries acquire meaning depending on who creates them, who controls them and who finds themselves on the other side.

Who owns the commons?

Faerie Newbuild is shown in dialogue with 10Foot’s Greater Villain, a series of prints based on an old folk verse concerning the enclosure of common land. The poem reverses the conventional idea of criminality by questioning why an individual who takes something from the commons may be punished while those powerful enough to take the commons themselves remain beyond sanction. World of Interiors dates the verse to the mid-eighteenth century, while 10Foot’s own account places it within the much longer history of enclosure and dispossession that informs both works.

That history became central to the development of CRIMINAL. 10Foot recommended Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra to the museum’s founders while the exhibition was being developed, describing the book as fundamental to his understanding of the commons, enclosure and dispossession. Its history of sailors, labourers, enslaved people and other communities pushed to the margins helped shape an exhibition that looks beyond homelessness as an isolated social condition and instead places it within a longer history of land, labour, criminalisation and resistance.

Graffiti and the contested city

This question has always been present within graffiti. Cities are filled with advertising, redevelopment hoardings, private signage and security infrastructure, yet an unsanctioned mark placed upon the same architecture is immediately understood through a different framework of ownership, permission and criminality.

10Foot’s practice has long existed within that tension, with his name appearing across spaces shaped by restriction, access and prohibition. In Faerie Newbuild, the lettering disappears but the underlying logic remains, as the physical boundary becomes a way of questioning the systems that decide who may occupy, alter or move through the city.

Rather than asking why somebody crossed a boundary, the work invites a more fundamental question about why that boundary was constructed at all.

CRIMINAL at the Museum of Homelessness

CRIMINAL: An Untold History of Homelessness, Resistance and Survival examines approximately 400 years of the criminalisation and marginalisation of homeless and nomadic people, tracing histories of enclosure, transportation, vagrancy laws, hostile policy and resistance. The exhibition brings together new work by 10Foot, Gemma Lees, Matt Bonner, Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives and Surfing Sofas, combining contemporary art with historical research and lived experience.

For 10Foot, the setting feels particularly resonant. After years spent negotiating the physical boundaries of the city, Faerie Newbuild turns that boundary into the subject itself, asking us to consider not simply who stands inside and who remains outside, but who had the authority to draw the line between them.

CRIMINAL is on view at the Museum of Homelessness, Finsbury Park, London, and has been extended due to popular demand until 31 October 2026.

CRIMINAL at the Museum of Homelessness, Finsbury Park, London.