Hackney Wick’s trees are decked with colour for the Olympics

The trees of Hackney Wick are decked with colourful artwork which will be revealed tonight to coincide with the Olympic opening ceremony.

The Wick Woven Web is made from more than 500 larger-than-life woven friendship bracelets, made by over 250 people at community events last weekend.

They have been joined together to form a web-like art installation tied to a tree in the newly-reopened Wick Village Green.

The artists behind the project, Beccy McCray, from Shoreditch, and Hannah Elbourne, from Hackney, said it took two days and a scaffolding tower to hang the artwork in the tree.

Beccy said: “It’s like a psychedelic treehouse. Our initial brief was to create a project in celebration of the creativity in Hackney Wick.

“It’s an area we all love. A couple of years ago we did a project in Victoria Park we wanted to make bigger. We made a human cats’ cradle wrapped all around lots of trees. Passers-by interacted really well with it.

“We were interested in the idea of folk trees and totems. The main concept is that we wanted to create a project where people could come and work together. We wanted it to be created from as many unwanted fabrics from east London as possible. It’s literally made from the fabric of the community.”

The bracelets were made at Crafternoon Tea Club sessions at Mabley Green festival last Saturday and outside the Hackney Pearl caf� on Sunday.

The Wick Woven Web is at Wick Village Green for the duration of the Games.