In a cultural scene still trudging its way to true inclusivity, nothing feels more refreshing, irreverent, and pioneering than a gargantuan installation that's meant to be enjoyed by all. That's what British-Nigerian artist and designer Yinka Ilori MBE's new large-scale artwork, Walk With Your Dreams, stands for — an experience of this creative world that, rather than remaining constrained within the walls of private institutions or galleries and the curatorial concepts of their design exhibitions, stretches its arms to embrace whoever happens to stumble into its fold.
Unveiled this Thursday, October 2, at Milton Keynes Station Square, a 40-minute train journey north-west of London Euston, the sprawling, kaleidoscopic piece expands over an abstract tapestry of vivid yellows, greens, and cherry red tones across 3,027 square meters. This is the latest in a series of community-focused artworks by the emerging talent, whose prolific production encompasses anything from colossal, open-air works to covetable furniture lines and high-profile brand collaborations, following similar public interventions at Fulham Pier, Helsinki's Amos Rex Museum, and Piccadilly Circus, among others.
Taking the "new town" of Milton Keynes, an 89-square-kilometer city originally set up in 1967 to ease the population overspill of London post World War II, and now home to some 300,000 inhabitants, as its backdrop, Walk With Your Dreams strives to celebrate the area's visionary origins, dynamic present, and ambitious future.
Milton Keynes — New Dreams for a New Town
The setting of Ilori's mesmerizing mural, which wows passersby as they step outside Milton Keynes Central Station, isn't coincidental. Despite its very recent city status, acquired in 2022, Milton Keynes serves as a positive example of contemporary urbanism.
Not only does the British hub boast "the fourth most start-ups per capita, and productivity almost a third above the UK average", Walk With Your Dreams' commissioners, Milton Keynes Development Partnership (MKDP) and Milton Keynes City Council, recount. But with 22 million trees and plants amounting to 35% of its surface and 34% of residents coming from ethnically diverse backgrounds, it also raises the bar for both outdoor living solutions and cultural integration.
The multidisciplinary artist's eye-catching installation, his largest public artwork to date, joins the 270 public artworks already dotting Milton Keynes from north to south, though this is the most ambitious and largest creative expression to grace its grounds yet.
British-Nigerian multidisciplinary artist and designer Yinka Ilori, sitting at the center of his largest creation yet, "Walk With Your Dreams", unveiled in front of Milton Keynes Central on October 2.
When we meet Ilori, a North Londoner, on the morning of its unveiling on the rooftop of the glassy Unity Place building — arguably the best viewpoint to catch Walk With Your Dreams in full — the designer explains that the love he instantly felt for Milton Keynes' people was what convinced him to submit a proposal for the square revamp.
"My parents come from Nigeria and grew up there," he tells me, adding that relocating to the UK inevitably took them away from their relatives and closest community. "For them, London can sometimes feel quite lonely," the artist explains. "And I can often relate to that."
In Milton Keynes, on the other hand, "I just felt at home from the very start," he says, recalling when, back in 2016, he would travel "back and forth" while completing a residency program at Milton Keynes Arts Centre. "There is something quite special about different people migrating here from somewhere else to build a new home, a new family, to be part of something new," Ilori adds. "That's what excites me about Milton Keynes."
"Walk With Your Dreams": A Tapestry of Stories
According to the 2024 Equality and Diversity in Milton Keynes report, the Black African population is one of the city's "fastest growing local minority ethnic communities", with Ghana, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and the Swahili-speaking, east-central Africa region cited amongst the top 20 largest BME groups based in the English suburb. Naturally, this made British-Nigerian Ilori a particularly fitting choice to honor their stories through design.
Reproducing the vibrancy of the Yoruban dyeing technique widespread in the western part of the continent through expansive swathes of paint, Walk With Your Dreams shows just how much there is to gain from living in a melting pot of cultures like Milton Keynes. For its creator, who points to people and nurturing a sense of belonging as the consistent drives behind his work, the 2D installation is a reminder of how — despite individuals claiming the opposite — "no one owns any specific space or place". Instead, "we're all building the spaces we inhabit together," he says.
The activation's uplifting palette doesn't just wink at the intricate, eye-catching motifs of the Sub-Saharan textile tradition, but echoes the birth and evolution of the Milton Keynes development, too: flowers reference the blooming of the new town's dream — its transition from utopia to reality — as well as the picturesque nature that surrounds it; beams of light stand in for "power and progress"; circles are used to capture the state of interconnectedness that sees the city's multiple communities coexist; and, last but not least, color is relied on to express the joyfulness, surprise, and optimism that few things like creativity unleash.
'Wayfinding' Art — An Inspiring Way of Finding Your Way Around Milton Keynes
The installation will make moving around town more intuitive by redirecting people to the underpasses that lead to Milton Keynes' city center through its stripy, eye-catching 'arms'.
Beyond its symbolic meaning, Walk With Your Dreams also fulfills a more practical function. A 'wayfinding' artwork informed by Milton Keynes' easily navigable grid system, its symmetry, and geometry, now integrated into the Station Square's new flooring scheme, the installation promises to facilitate pedestrians' movements around the city by highlighting the walking routes and underpasses that make up the destination's central artery.
"Yinka has an exemplary record of developing and delivering exceptional public realm works which respond to place, community, and context," Adam Sciberras, special projects director at Milton Keynes Development Partnership, shares. This project, he continues, is about setting out what people can expect from Milton Keynes, offering "a great introduction to our young, innovative, diverse, and sustainable city and the vibrancy, enthusiasm, and biodiversity that people experience here."
Bold color and hypnotic patterns have become a staple of Ilori's oeuvre. Still, he promises, these aren't mere stylistic choices; they influence the way people perceive, engage with, and react to the work. Every detail of Walk With Your Dreams, from the choice and placement of the plants around it to the intensity and juxtaposition of its hues and how organic and geometric shapes alternate in it, was fully intentional.
"I have recently heard something quite interesting about how certain forms can cause you to move quickly or slowly," the artist explains, smiling at the idea of kids running through the piece's striped alleyways. "There will be a space where people walk, one where they sprint, one where they stand, and one where they sit," Ilori says. He sees the site's potential to become a meeting point, "like King's Cross with its Jacques Rival Identified Flying Object bird cage". Even more than that, he hopes it will prompt passersby to consider the impact it can have on their day: "How does stepping on this mural really make you feel?"
Behind the Crafting of an Evolving, Larger-Than-Life Masterpiece
An aerial view of Yinka Ilori's "Walk With Your Dreams", captured from the Milton Keynes's station side.
The blossoms in Ilori's walkable art attack aren't the only ones to adorn the exterior of Milton Keynes Central Station. Landscape architects Planit have been tapped to encircle Walk With Your Dreams with a raw, prairie-style planting scheme that will shift and transform with the seasons.
Think poetic patches of greater meadow-rue and wand flower, intense drops of color brought in via red bistort and Echinacea 'Guava Ice', and wilder, unruly touches given by evergreens like sweet box and Turkestan feather grass, with "pastel-shaded bulbs, rich herbaceous planting, and flowering species" set to alternate over the warmer months.
"Yinka's work is so energetic, so we wanted planting that would hold its own in regard to choreographed color," Frankie Smith-Morris, landscape architect at the firm, says of the natural banking "that frames the central artwork." Ultimately, though, no ornament complements Walk With Your Dreams better than those who get to move across it — you'll know it when you see it.
In for more immersive art explorations? See how Mexican artist and designer Daniel Valero, the founder of rising studio Mestiz, breathed a new dose of whimsy into Instagram-viral restaurant, sketch, at AGO Projects' ongoing showcase ¡hola, London!.
