This site-specific art installation of a 360m-long white flower-shaped bench developed in collaboration with artist Fran Cottell reflects on the Rootstein Hopkins Parade Ground as the imaginary site for Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and enacted in the Millbank Penitentiary. Later a military parade ground and now a university campus, outdoor gallery and thoroughfare to Tate Britain, the site’s complex history and contemporary functions represent a cross-section of architecture’s power to orchestrate social modes.

Pentagon Petal re-enacted a scaled version of Bentham’s prison’s infamous plan, editing and reinterpreting it into a socially active form. Each of the six petals or pentagons – originally so designed to facilitate control through solitary confinement – now invite informal gathering. The installation played with ideas of exclusion and segregation, layering a generous offering of further geometries within the larger barren square.