Two Central Saint Martins Fine Art graduates are bringing large-scale new works exploring men’s mental health and women’s freedom to Wembley Park, transforming one of London Designer Outlet’s busiest walkways into a public art space.
Opening on 24th August 2026, Invisible Figures brings together newly commissioned works by emerging artists Henry Gibbs and Bhawana Jain, installed across an eight-metre-wide wall at London Designer Outlet (LDO).
The commission began with a deceptively simple question: “What does someone carry that isn’t visible?”
Gibbs and Jain have responded from very different perspectives, creating works informed by LDO’s longstanding partnerships with male mental health and suicide-prevention charity Talk Club and domestic and sexual abuse charity Solace Women’s Aid.
Henry Gibbs: Becoming
Created in response to Talk Club, Gibbs’ Becoming explores suppressed emotion, masculinity and the difficulties that can surround genuine connection.
The artist combines found imagery, physical objects and digital processes into a densely layered composition of obscured figures, gestures, reflections, shadows and digital distortions.
At its centre is what Gibbs calls “the state of becoming” — the idea that identity is never fixed but continually reshaped through emotions, relationships and experience.
The work considers the pressure on men to conform and maintain a guarded exterior, and how expectations around masculinity can encourage vulnerability to remain hidden.
That tension is embedded physically in the image. From a distance, Becoming reads as a bold digital composition; move closer and halftone dots, shadowed hands and partially concealed details begin to emerge.
Gibbs said:
“The process behind the work became a metaphor for continued evolution, development and expansion. Our emotions and identities vary and evolve day by day. The act of opening up and experiencing ourselves — something that is central to Talk Club — can allow us to understand ourselves better.”
Bhawana Jain: Fictioning Freedom
Jain takes the commission in a very different direction.
Created in response to Solace Women’s Aid, Fictioning Freedom asks how women can feel expansive, rather than framing their experiences solely through struggle or trauma.
Born in Assam, India, Jain has created an image of women moving through an expansive natural landscape accompanied by 200 metres of flowing red fabric.
Drawing on red textiles worn and used by women across South Asian cultures, the fabric connects the figures to cultural memory and generations of women while simultaneously allowing them to occupy and reshape the landscape around them.
The image was captured by drone in Ramanagara, Karnataka, India, a place Jain visited on childhood picnics. From above, its figures shift between appearing tiny within the landscape and asserting themselves across it through the enormous trail of red material.
Jain herself appears within the work playing the Sulur, a traditional carved bamboo wind instrument, while facing the sun.
The freedom she experienced while making the piece became central to the finished work.
“I wanted this work to imagine what it feels like to belong in the landscape, to take up space without apology and to exist beyond the expectations that so often shape women’s lives,” Jain said. “I hope it invites others to question what has been normalised, reclaim space for themselves and believe that another way of being is possible.”
Art in the everyday
What connects the two works is the idea that what someone is experiencing internally may bear little resemblance to what is immediately visible from the outside.
Rather than placing that conversation inside a conventional gallery, Invisible Figures inserts it into the everyday movement of Wembley Park.
Installed on Level 1 of London Designer Outlet between Superdry and Calvin Klein, the works will be encountered by thousands of people who may have arrived to shop, eat or attend an event rather than specifically to see contemporary art.
For Michelle D’Vaz-Plant, Head of Marketing at LDO, that unexpected encounter is an important part of the project.
“We believe a shared public space like ours can do more than serve a practical purpose — it can create opportunities for culture, understanding and connection.”
She added:
“This commission brings together people, place and purpose: giving new artistic talent a platform, making contemporary art part of everyday life and bringing greater visibility to experiences that too often remain unseen.”
For Gibbs and Jain, the result is two very different images occupying the same public space: one asks viewers to look beneath the surface, while the other asks what might happen when you’re finally free to take up more of it.
Henry Gibbs & Bhawana Jain: Invisible Figures, London Designer Outlet, Wembley Park, London, from 24th August 2026.
