If you've noticed the quiet from me this August, here's a bit of why.
I spent three weeks over the month doing a residency called In Practice, hosted by Out of Practice, a design history research studio and reading room founded by Dr Vivien Chan, based in a room on the first floor of The People's Hall in Nottingham.
The building itself has its own long history of women and reinvention. It was built in 1750 as Morley House, commissioned by Ann Morley, a successful Georgian businesswoman and potter. It later became the School of Design, training workers for the city's lace and textile trades, then a working class institute with a library and reading rooms open to both men and women.
There was something quite fitting about sitting in a space with that lineage, still unfinished, no water, no wifi, just a large table, some lamps, and a small library of books and zines, whilst trying to work out my own next chapter.
The residency itself had no brief, no pressure to complete anything. It's simply time and space to be, as Viv puts it, "in practice". I spent it alongside two artists who have become genuine friends and collaborators, Khadijah and Sophie.
On the first day, Sophie asked us to bring something meaningful to share with us. Without planning it, all three of us brought a piece of jewellery. That was the moment that stuck with me most. Through those objects we started talking about places we'd travelled to, where our ancestors might be from, materials we felt connected to, and time itself as something we move through rather than along.
It wasn't planned, it was serendipity, coming back to my own practice unprompted, thinking about the material culture of jewellery and objects in that way. To do that collectively, without either of us setting out to, was really special.
As a maker, someone who's built her practice mostly around product, this felt like a different kind of making. Less about the outcome, more about the in-between. We spent three weeks exploring liminal space, not as a concept but as somewhere to actually stand in. Thresholds, doorways, the curved arch of a fireplace we kept returning to. A bird motif found us early on above that same fireplace and never let go. Birds evolve, move, change shape in flight. We took that movement on ourselves, meandering through People's Hall, then asking what it might mean to carry that same freedom out into the world, into the small circles where we each have influence.
Time, held differently, the past in front of us because we've already seen how it plays out, the future behind us, and us moving backwards through it, whether we were ready or not.
If I think back to what this residency really gave me, it was time to sit with my ancestral trip to India earlier this year and start dissecting it properly. What am I leaving behind, and what do I want to carry forward. That question sat alongside something else I've been carrying too personally, a process of my own that's felt deeply liminal, holding hope while sitting in-between, not knowing, and trusting that things within me - where my work, my practice, are constantly changing and evolving anyway.
Honestly, the last two and a half years have been me trying to piece together, and often unpick, what my practice actually is and what I take into its next step. Some days it feels sludgy, like I'm stuck, other days it's felt clear and powerful. This residency didn't resolve that, but it gave me somewhere to hold it, with people who could hold it alongside me.
"I have wings but cannot seem to fly.
I am told I am strong and resilient and adapted to withstand impact, but I want to be vulnerable and soft."
(snippets of writing from the residency)
The other thing this residency gave me wasn't unexpected, but it landed anyway. Connection. I've lived in the Midlands for ten years now, after London, and I'll be honest, building community with other global majority women here has sometimes felt harder than it did there. In London it came easily, without trying. Here it's taken longer. Spending these weeks with Khadijah and Sophie reminded me what that connection feels like, why it matters, and how rare and needed it is.
Historically, we'd move through liminal spaces and transition periods with community and support around us. So much of what we do now is isolated, singular. This residency reminded me how important it is to be supported in this journey.
Another conclusion I've come to is that maybe the journey of being an artist is learning to be comfortable sitting in the liminal. As artists we're often the ones who feel institutional and global change happening first, that churn, before it's named. I think particularly being neurodivergent and energetically sensitive, you feel those things in your bones.
I've been feeling how quickly the world is changing in my bones, and my own inner, personal life has been changing alongside it. How my practice sits within all of that is something I'm still questioning.
So if I think about this residency, and I think about questions rather than answers, they'd be these. How does this liminal space inform my practice? How can I surrender to the liminal space I'm in? Where might it lead me? And if something needs to change and be left behind, what might that be?
Who I was in the room with
Khadijah Carberry is a creative practitioner and founder of Generous Waste, exploring relationality and connection through materials, storytelling and collective making. Her work takes a geopolitical and systems thinking approach, using making and mapping to trace material journeys and reveal global entanglements. Through speculative cartographies and relational mapping, she positions making as a form of soft power, shifting how value, voice and connection are understood.
Sophie Gresswell is an artist, poet and facilitator exploring interconnected living heritage and storytelling. She works with questions, metaphors and play to explore how human lives intersect across generations, cultures and histories. With a mother who is a photographer and a father who was a journalist turned poet, strands of archive and narratives of truth run through her practice, an invitation to sit with our unknowns and in-betweens, where deeper connection becomes possible.
