● ● ● our archive 𓆑

past residencies:
Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (2024-2025)
Anomalous Social Club (2025-2026)

all workshops here are available for hosting. send us a query!

Memory is the Seamstress
Jan 2025
A.P.T. Gallery

Featured on:
New Exhibitions
SHAPESLewisham

Our first exhibition focused on imageries where memory is uncertain, challenged, and abstracted into material and sculptural manipulations.

Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.
- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Fluid and immersive works are presented throughout the gallery, alongside communal artworks that visitors have the opportunity to add to. These were accompanied by workshops.

Memory, as Woolf denotes, is inconsistent. After long enough, memory can become myth, it can become legend. Memory can also be secret, known by only one or two bearers, and held by them. Only if it is spoken aloud and passed on can it survive. Memories rely on storytellers for their survival, and the artists in the exhibition know this. They intuitively weave their memories as stories, with words, with scent, with memorial, and as secrets. It is not for us to know which elements are embellished, which accounts are verbatim. Memories are but stories, and everybody knows the best stories are ever changing.

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Threading Memory
2024-2025

A Particular Reality
Take Up Space, 2024
Thames-Side Studios
Loose Ends, 2024
A.P.T. Gallery
Memory is the Seamstress, 2025

Threading Memory is a participatory textile work centred on memory, touch and the cumulative traces produced through collective stitching.

Participants work into a shared piece of sheer muslin using similarly coloured thread. Embroidery, darning, cutting, crochet and other textile processes can be used to add to, follow, alter, repair or undo marks left by previous participants. The cloth carries its previous interventions with it. It gradually becomes a material record of touch, duration and collective authorship.

The workshop first developed through A Particular Reality’s Take Up Space programme in 2024, before being activated at Thames-Side Studios as part of Loose Ends. In January 2025 it became part of a participatory installation for our show.

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Stitch Circle
ongoing / regular sessions

Constance Howard Gallery, 2024
Goldsmiths CCA Residency, 2024-2025
Anomalous Space
Gosh Darn It!, 2025

Stitch Circle is an informal communal making format in which participants gather to sew, mend and work on textile projects alongside one another.

Participants can bring unfinished work, begin something new, use shared materials or ask for guidance with processes including embroidery, sewing, knitting, crochet, weaving and mending. This creates a social space around making, conversation and skill exchange.

Drawing from Film
ongoing / regular sessions

Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, Residents’ Space
Anomalous Space (ASC)

Drawing From Film is a collective observational drawing exercise based off of film screenings.

A selected film is watched together and paused at intervals. During each pause, participants draw the frame currently on screen before the film continues. Participants accumulate a sequence of fragments across the duration of the film. Together, these drawings form an individual hand-drawn edit of the screening.

Pocket Shrines

John Stainer Primary School, 2025
Anomalous Space, 2026

Working at an intimate scale, pocket shrines uses textile, image, assemblage and decorative processes to create individual shrines that can be held, folded or carried. Participants stitch and put together portable spaces for memory, care, and personal symbolism.

These objects, textures and symbols become part of a small handmade structure.

The format was initially adapted for Year 2 pupils at John Stainer Primary School in 2025 and subsequently developed for an adult workshop at Anomalous Space in 2026.

Aromatherapy & custom scent-blending
ongoing / regular sessions

Miiro Hotels, Gather, 2025
Anomalous Space, 2026
Feather & Black, 2026

Variations:
Custom scent blending
Aromatherapy candle making
Sleep and rest-focused scent workshop

Aromatherapy & Custom Scent Blending is a sensory workshop centred on developing an individual fragrance through guided exploration of essential oils and other scent materials.

Participants smell and select ingredients before learning how different materials can be combined into a personalised blend.

The core format is adapted to different settings and audiences. At Miiro Hotels it formed part of the Gather workshop programme. At Anomalous Space, scent blending was extended into the making of an aromatherapy candle. For Feather & Black, the workshop was tailored around sleep, rest and the sensory environment of the bedroom.

This workshop works in public, hospitality, retail and commissioned settings while retaining scent blending and sensory attention as its central process.

Sessions and blends are produced and made by Cleo and Xuan.

Social Dream Drawing
2025

Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, Residents’ Space

Social Dream Drawing explores dreams and memory through individual and collective drawing. Participants begin with images, spaces, sensations and fragments retained after dreaming, using unstable recollections as prompts for drawing, writing, colour and spontaneous mark-making. The workshop treats dreaming as a form of internal storytelling.

As memories are translated into marks and shared with others, images can shift, overlap and acquire new associations.

Organised by Ellie Bird, the workshop blends visual storytelling, collective memory, drawing on autobiographical fictioning, fairytales, and dreamscapes.

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Confessional Writing Workshops
ongoing / regular sessions

Teaspoon Projects
A Thousand-Pointed Star, 2025

Memory is the Seamstress
Hidden Remembrances, 2025

Confessional writing workshops that explore confession, anonymity, and the physical afterlife of written memory.

In Hidden Remembrances, participants anonymously write memories, thoughts, or confessions, then the writings are shredded to remove their legibility while preserving their material presence. These fragments are then suspended from a tree branch to be part of a collective installation.

For A Thousand-Pointed Star, participants instead respond to writing prompts, before translating these fragments, rhythms, and emotional qualities from their texts into sewn marks, such that text is fragmented, obscured, and transformed through the slower and more laborious process of sewing.

This series brings together writing and textile practice as parallel ways of recording thought and personal experience.

Writing workshops led by Cleo Nelson.

Communal Backstrap Weaving
ongoing / regular sessions

Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, Residents’ Space, 2025

Anomalous Space, 2025

絲 sī is a Communal Backstrap Weaving Workshop in which participants are called to hold space and tension in their bodies, redirecting this energy into the repetitive act of weaving. The backstrap looms are tethered to one another, in silent conversation, bringing about themes centred on labour and care, while remaining anchored in their bodies.

Participants therefore must work in physical alignment with one another.

“絲” (the traditional Chinese character for “silk”, pronounced sī) is a homonym of “撕.” The word evokes the act of tearing apart, while drawing back to its reconstruction.

Organised by Xuan, variations include working on wooden heddles, as well as DIY materials such as bamboo stakes that enable participants to learn basic plain weave using materials easily found at home.

Banner Making
2026

Skinners’ Academy

For Skinners Academy’s activities week we had the privilege of running three long workshops, with a different class of key stage 2 students for a day each.

We made banners inspired by the school’s motto: be kind, be curious, be brave, with each student responsible for a single patch. The result was three colourful collaborative banners celebrating the school’s values.

For the morning sessions, we introduced the history of union banners, showing examples of artists and workers, and discussing what makes an effective banner. Then we created sample patches where students could practise techniques and stitches including couching, appliqué, sashiko, chain stitch and back stitch. For the mid day and afternoon sessions, the students worked on their patches, choosing their own fabrics and designing their decorations, before putting the pieces together to form the whole.

The project was planned and delivered by Heera and Seb, who made sure that the text was red and white to correspond with the school’s colours, and create a visually cohesive final piece, despite the eclectic mix of fabrics the students chose.

Victorian Pouch Making
2024

in collaboration with
Synonym Lab

Participants learnt basic sewing and pattern-cutting skills to make a cute little accessory with inspiration from real historic women’s clothing.

Fabric, stitching, embellishment, and the intimate scale of the pouch creates a way of exploring textiles through adornment, carried close to the body, as well as a newfound appreciation for the utilitarian purposes of the pouches which were historically hidden under large dresses by Victorian women, and reimagined to be externalised.

Setting Roots
2025

Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, Residents’ Space

This 3 hour session explored conversations around community, rest, care, and the importance of shared spaces, using ethical ingredients and materials.

“Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.” - Audre Lorde

During the slow paced workshop, participants will sat and wove mini woollen coasters together, and shared their thoughts and discussions over hot ginger tea, considering the following questions:
How do we activate community?
Do you feel you are part of a community?
What are the communities we align ourselves with and the intersections that are left out?
What communal spaces exist? What communal spaces do we want to exist?

Led by Ellie and Xuan, the workshop prioritises themes and motifs around healing and warmth, using traditionally “warm” ingredients in the tea.