Figures

Figures was a mass-sculptural performance that set out to make visible the human cost of austerity and urge action against it. ¹ Performed in early 2015, across the four months leading up to the United Kingdom (UK) general election, the work was an activist response to five years of austerity enacted by a Conservative-led coalition government in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis. With huge cuts and reforms to public services, the policy had taken, and continues to take, a heavy toll. ² Initially applied to social security, where disabled people became the first to be hit, the austerity programme expanded to government departments and local authorities, with an onslaught on home care, hospital treatments, funding for student tuition, school building programmes, emergency services, libraries, public sector wages, road maintenance and so on, through the whole spectrum of social infrastructure (O’Hara, 2014; Cooper & Whyte, 2017).