♥ Client: Women's Museum
♥ Collaboration: Adanna Group
♥ Year: 2025
♥ Location: Sheffield
♥ Collaboration: Adanna Group
♥ Year: 2025
♥ Location: Sheffield
Tender Women is a 2025 commission developed through a series of workshops with members of the Adanna Women's Support Group, a non-profit organisation supporting women through challenges in their lives. Commissioned as the Spring artistic commission of Desire Lines, the reopening programme of the Women's Museum in Barking, the project explores how material transformation, personal agency, and lived experience can be expressed through making. The resulting exhibition brought together selected works created by participants, presented alongside a new responsive piece by Sahra Hersi.
The workshops introduced indigo dyeing, cyanotype, cross-stitch, collage, and poetry. These processes have long been associated with domestic or feminised craft, and have often been undervalued within mainstream art and design contexts. Here, they were approached as material systems with spatial, poetic, and political potential. Their transformational qualities, indigo deepening in colour as it meets air, cyanotype developing through sunlight, became central to the conversations. These shifts in colour and form echoed discussions within the group about resilience, emergence, and navigating life on one's own terms.
The idea of desire lines, the informal paths created by repeated movement, shaped the wider project. This metaphor offered a way to think about intuitive decision-making and the routes people create when existing structures do not fully reflect their needs or experiences.
Across five sessions, the workshops held space for experimentation, conversation, and shared making. Participants explored themes of autonomy, care, and possibility through materials that reveal themselves slowly, through time, exposure, and interaction. The exhibition's title emerged from the group itself, chosen collectively through a collaborative poetry exercise.
Although rooted in the specific experiences of the Adanna Women's Support Group, the project sits within a wider practice concerned with material processes, spatial storytelling, and the cultural significance of craft.
With thanks to the women of Adanna and The Women's Museum for their openness and generosity in sharing their stories and artworks.
The workshops introduced indigo dyeing, cyanotype, cross-stitch, collage, and poetry. These processes have long been associated with domestic or feminised craft, and have often been undervalued within mainstream art and design contexts. Here, they were approached as material systems with spatial, poetic, and political potential. Their transformational qualities, indigo deepening in colour as it meets air, cyanotype developing through sunlight, became central to the conversations. These shifts in colour and form echoed discussions within the group about resilience, emergence, and navigating life on one's own terms.
The idea of desire lines, the informal paths created by repeated movement, shaped the wider project. This metaphor offered a way to think about intuitive decision-making and the routes people create when existing structures do not fully reflect their needs or experiences.
Across five sessions, the workshops held space for experimentation, conversation, and shared making. Participants explored themes of autonomy, care, and possibility through materials that reveal themselves slowly, through time, exposure, and interaction. The exhibition's title emerged from the group itself, chosen collectively through a collaborative poetry exercise.
Although rooted in the specific experiences of the Adanna Women's Support Group, the project sits within a wider practice concerned with material processes, spatial storytelling, and the cultural significance of craft.
With thanks to the women of Adanna and The Women's Museum for their openness and generosity in sharing their stories and artworks.