Over the last 18 months, my textile practice has evolved into a bolder, and more experimental discipline. This shift began in 2025 at Traces, a site-specific event in the Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park. Challenged to respond to the park’s rich history, biology, and materials, I started to explore how my work might create connection and conversation as well as a finished object.
The cemetery is full of personal history to me. I grew up nearby and it was a feature in my childhood geography: a place of adventure and discovery. For Traces, I memorialised the 1887 funeral of Alfred Linnell, who was killed by the police at a demonstration. I hand crafted a banner embroidered with words from Death Song, a William Morris poem, working with his ‘useful and beautiful’ constraint in mind.
While making, I worked directly at a number of sites including the William Morris Gallery, Red Lion Square where Morris had lived, and in the cemetery where he read his poem as up to 120,000 Londoners bore witness to Linnell’s funeral.
Traces was the week before my daughter’s wedding and my feelings of intensity, urgency and change increased as both personal and artistic deadlines accelerated and coinicded. My daughter’s wedding, on the banks of the River Lea in Hackney, reconnected me personally and emotionally with a river I had crossed tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of times in my lifetime.
From that week onwards, the image of the river kept rising in my ideas and curiosities, and I started to let myself be guided by the flow of what emerged. First, a collaborative stitch project led me Natalie Diaz’s poetry on the Colorado River. Soon after, I joined a friend on on a long-anticipated walk at the Broomway in the Thames estuary. It was a magnificent blue crystalline day, sharp, cold and utterly beautiful. We walked for four hours, boots submerged in shallow water, unsure whether we were treading the bed of a sea or a river, and at times visually unable to discern the line between sea and sky on the horizon.
In winter I committed to walking the course of the Lea from its source back to the Thames. I wanted to see the river I had lived near most of my life in its full journey and start to comprehend it as system of connection, between species, geographies and communities.
When I finally I arrived at the source in Leagrave to start that walk 6 months later, other aspects of my life had started to shift. I was offered an artist residency, I took a job and left it shortly after realising it was not right for me. There were weeks I felt quite lost and the walk took on the shape and significance of a personal pilgrimage.
My residency resulted in a piece for an exhibition called The Crossing: low tide: a naturally dyed and hand stitched quilt based on the riverbed at the Thames estuary. Within the piece were 80 stones gathered from the River Lea and its chalk stream reaches at Wheathampstead. The day after the exhibition closed I put the stones in a backpack and headed to Luton, where I placed them at the source of the river.
Since that walk I have felt a number of strands in my life slowly coming together, like a confluence of streams. I am now involved in a project based on the River Ching, a tributary of the Lea in Waltham Forest, which allows me to investigate and experience another aspect of the Lea river system. And recently I took part in Island Futures, an event run by Material Cultures at Tipping Point East, where practitioners and community activists were brought together to work with materials associated with capitalism and empire and invited to reimagine how we might relate to them differently.
I am trying to hold this moment as an intentional pause, which is difficult when the water is rushing forward around me, but I want to take bearings and understand the direction this will take me. One thing is clear: there is a diminishing distinction between my work, how I feel, what I do and what matters to me. That feels both powerful and exciting. I feel like I am now in the midst of water that has decided to come together and be a particular river.