Hotel Kittiwake+
2025/2026
An aphoticdepths.xyz project*coming soon* Public sculpture: First Light Festival, Lowestoft, 20-21 June 2026
Exhibition, Hotel Kittiwake+ Stakeholder Lounge: Microscope, London, 12-27 March 2026
Workshops: Battery of Ideas, Lowestoft, March-April 2026
MA Unit: MA Design for Social Innovation & Sustainable Futures, London College of Communication, January-March 2026
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Hotel Kittiwake+ is a large scale public sculpture, a series of role-playing workshops, and an exhibition that responds to artificial nesting towers installed in Lowestoft, Suffolk as compensatory habitats for seabird populations affected by offshore wind development. Known locally as “Kittiwake Hotels,” these structures were built by energy companies as a condition of expanding wind farms further out in the North Sea.
Appearing clearly on the horizon, the hotels reveal the dynamics of the ocean as a site of infrastructural and biological meeting, where certain areas might be approved for industry in return for ecological compensation elsewhere. Taking these structures as a conceptual foundation, Hotel Kittiwake+ invites people to collectively reimagine what a ‘hotel’ for marine life could be when framed by oceanic thinking.
Hotel Kittiwake+ has been supported by a Lighthouse Grant from TIDAL ArtS, a project offering grants to artists, collectives, and creatives to support the European Union’s Mission to Restore Our Ocean and Waters by 2030.
Workshops:
Battery of Ideas, Lowestoft, March-April 2026
Hotel Kittiwake+ involved a series of workshops hosted at Battery of Ideas, Lowestoft, in a custom-built, large set that closely imitates the architecture of the offshore structures. These sessions brought together local residents for role-playing exercises, where participants inhabited the perspectives of marine entities and built phenomena as a method for thinking and negotiating across species boundaries. In both the workshops and the exhibition, the hotels were approached as ecological and cultural architecture that arise from a decision-making process around responsibility, repair, coexistence, and ultimately profitability.
The decisions and drawings made in the workshops informed the creation of a public artwork: a sculptural reimagining of a Kittiwake Hotel. The public work will be presented at First Light Festival in June 2026.
Exhibition, Hotel Kittiwake+ Stakeholder Lounge:
Microscope, London, 12-27 March 2026
The Hotel Kittiwake+ Stakeholder Lounge exhibition repurposed corporate language, design parameters and structural materials from the hotels themselves. In doing so, it introduced an alternative framing, where multiple species are active participants in the development of offshore infrastructure.
The exhibition paid attention to the inclusion of 3D printed decoy birds on the ‘hotels’ to attract nesting by real black-legged kittiwakes; these decoy birds are rough representations of kittiwakes, and noticeably exclude their eponymous black legs.
Artworks in the exhibitions included: rotating 3D printed decoy kittiwake produced by 3DPC, identical in form to the decoys on the Ørsted Kittiwake Hotels (2026); aluminium shelving, custom built as a smaller imitation of the shelving design of the Ørsted Kittiwake Hotels; 3D printed kittiwake legs, sand eel lures, engravings of Kittiwake Hotel design parameters (2026); Birds of the World magazine Part 1 Vol 4, (1969); Doggerland Windustries’ visualisation of Ørsted’s Kittiwake Hotel, 3D animation and film, (2026); perforated steel flooring that map North Sea wind farm cable routes, with brass engravings of bird collision modelling (2025/6); wearable stakeholder lanyards (2026).
The exhibition Hotel Kittiwake+ Stakeholder Lounge was aided by workshops with students from MA Design for Social Innovation & Sustainable Futures at London College of Communication (LCC). Working collectively, students developed speculative stakeholder profiles and alternative marine hotel proposals, and questioned the politics of compensation.
