VAA OpenSpaces 2025, 2026, Flax, Community Textile Practice & Learning To Say Yes

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited by the Visual Artists Association to speak during an international online session introducing OpenSpaces 2026. The session reflected on the first ever OpenSpaces programme, which launched in 2025, and brought together artists from different countries and disciplines who were considering taking part in the next programme. I was invited to share my experiences as a participating artist from the inaugural OpenSpaces 2025 cohort. As a contemporary community textile artist working with flax, heritage and shared public making in Derbyshire, it felt strange in the best possible way to be discussing my work with artists from across the world when so much of it begins very close to home, growing flax in my front garden, speaking with neighbours, researching local textile history and learning directly through the slow physical process of making by hand.

During the discussion, I spoke about ‘Beneath Our Feet’, the evolving flax project I have been developing by growing flax in Riddings, researching Derbyshire's lost linen heritage, and creating opportunities for communities to handle, break, spin, and make with fibre themselves. What began as a personal curiosity about land, cloth, and post-industrial identity has gradually expanded into broader reflections on sustainability, participation, memory, local knowledge, and how textile skills can move between people through direct experience rather than formal instruction alone.

Before taking part in OpenSpaces 2025, I completed the Art Curation & Exhibition Management Course through the Visual Artists Association, led by Karen van Hoey Smith. Although the course is entirely separate from OpenSpaces itself and absolutely not a requirement for taking part, I personally found it hugely helpful in building confidence in presenting, shaping audience experience, and thinking more ambitiously about how work can be encountered publicly. What I appreciated was that these conversations still felt approachable and grounded rather than intimidating or exclusive. There was no expectation to arrive fully polished or certain of your direction. Instead, artists were encouraged to trust their ideas, think beyond conventional exhibition formats and recognise that artist-led activity can emerge from small scale, local and deeply personal starting points. There was also a genuine sense of enjoyment around the process, something that can easily disappear within professional arts conversations.

Karolina Simaskaite from the Visual Artists Association later invited me to return as the featured artist speaker during the international OpenSpaces 2026 online session, reflecting on my experiences of participating in the inaugural OpenSpaces programme and discussing the development of ‘Beneath Our Feet’ with prospective participants and artists from different disciplines and countries.

For many artists, opening up work publicly can feel uncomfortable. There is often an assumption that you need a perfect studio, a fully resolved body of work or complete confidence in what you are doing before stepping into visibility. My own experience of OpenSpaces felt very different from that. The responses people connected with most strongly were often the honest ones, the unfinished ideas, the experiments, the questions and the stories rooted in material, place and process.

If you mainly want to hear me waffle on about flax, participation, local textile history and all things ‘Beneath Our Feet’, then feel free to keep reading. If you are more interested in how OpenSpaces itself might support your own practice, confidence or public visibility as an artist, you can skip ahead to the paragraph beginning 'Conversations during the OpenSpaces session...’

That emphasis on openness, participation and material experience has become increasingly important within my own work. Through flax growing and community textile activities, I have found myself increasingly interested in collaboration, exchange, and collective discovery rather than fixed outcomes alone. Some of the most memorable moments have happened through direct encounters, watching somebody break flax fibre for the first time, hearing memories of Derbyshire’s textile industries surface unexpectedly during conversation, or seeing groups gathered around piles of fibre, seed baskets and hand twisted cordage discussing cloth as something connected to land, labour and everyday life rather than something distant or industrially produced. One conversation that stayed with me involved local memories of Ripley Lido hosting a swimwear competition connected to the nearby Everlastic knitwear company when an important dignitary visited the area. Moments like this reveal how much textile history still survives quietly within personal memory, local storytelling and everyday conversation, even when those histories are no longer widely visible within the landscape itself.

A large part of what drives the project is a desire to remain hyperlocal and pay attention to the value of ordinary lives, everyday knowledge and the stories held within the places people already live. Some of this thinking has also grown out of my earlier ‘creative listening’ work developed through Make/Shift's Neighbourhood Creative Agents programme, alongside research into Stephen Willats's ideas, particularly around everyday social structures, lived experience, and paying close attention to how people understand their own environments. Rather than existing as separate strands, these experiences gradually feed into one another and continue to shape how I approach collective exchange, listening, place, and material in my textile practice. The ethos of the Creative Agents programme, with its emphasis on local people, lived experience and grassroots creativity, has undoubtedly influenced the way I now think about flax, participation and neighbourhood connection within ‘Beneath Our Feet’. Those exchanges have made me increasingly aware of how much civic pride can emerge by reconnecting people with overlooked local histories, shared skills, and the understanding that places once shaped by industry, extraction, and manufacture still hold creative value and cultural memory.

The work has also led me to think about flax itself as a kind of social connector between neighbours. As seeds, stories, skills, and materials begin moving from person to person, new relationships and conversations form between people who might otherwise never have spoken. In some ways, it feels similar to a living mycelium network growing quietly through streets and communities, creating connection through shared acts of growing, making, curiosity and exchange. That way of thinking was also influenced by my experience as an 'Anchor Woman' for the Walking Forest project, where ideas around interconnection, ecology, movement and community became increasingly present within the way I understood both people and place.

Conversations during the OpenSpaces session also reinforced how common feelings of hesitation, uncertainty and self-doubt can be when opening work publicly. Artists spoke honestly about anxiety, visibility, wondering whether their work was ready and questioning whether they were experienced enough to take part at all. They were feelings I recognised immediately within myself. That openness was part of what made the discussion feel so valuable. Rather than presenting artistic practice as polished or fully resolved, the session acknowledged that creativity often develops through uncertainty, experimentation, and public learning as you go.

Part of the reason OpenSpaces 2025 mattered so deeply to me personally was it offered the validation that the audience I hoped to reach through ‘Beneath Our Feet’ being not necessarily people regularly visiting large cultural institutions or established contemporary art spaces, was a legitimate contemporary art target. The conversations I am interested in often happen elsewhere, in pubs, cafés, libraries, community centres, at bus stops or along dog walking routes. They happen between neighbours, through shared memories, practical making and chance encounters around flax, fibre and local history. Approaching textile practice through public and community-facing spaces allows contemporary art to become more embedded within ordinary social spaces and creates opportunities for people to encounter creativity in environments that already feel familiar to them.

This approach also removes some of the barriers that can prevent people from engaging creatively in the first place. When creativity exists closer to everyday life, whether in neighbourhood spaces, shared venues or familiar public settings, participation no longer depends on transport costs, specialist equipment, formal training or entering unfamiliar cultural environments. People can take part in their own time, through ordinary acts of making, sharing and conversation, while still feeling connected to the wider life of their community.

Accessibility also shaped how I approached sharing knowledge throughout the project during OpenSpaces 2025. I used clear everyday language rather than specialist terminology, alongside simple visual instruction sheets and graphics that allowed people to follow processes through images as well as text. The interpretation boards and labels followed that same desire for openness and accessibility rather than assuming prior knowledge or familiarity with textile terminology. Some of this thinking also grew from my earlier work as a Community Engagement Officer connected to the Turner Prize, where part of my role involved helping audiences decode contemporary exhibitions and conversations that often felt inaccessible to them. I also worked alongside Anna Foley to develop an accessibility guide for the exhibition, which further reinforced the importance of clear communication and reducing barriers to contemporary art. My illustrations for OpenSpaces 2025 intentionally included people from different ethnic backgrounds because I wanted the work to feel open, recognisable and welcoming rather than tied to a narrow idea of who textile knowledge belongs to. As a back street northern girl, creating work that feels approachable rather than exclusive has become part of my raison d’être as an artist.

OpenSpaces 2025 also gave me the impetus to recognise that showing work did not need to become separated from the kinds of places, values and social connections that already mattered within my practice. Instead of feeling pressure to move away from everyday environments, the experience reinforced the possibility that contemporary textile practice could remain rooted in the rhythms of ordinary life while still being taken seriously as art. In many ways, the programme also pushed me to stop endlessly thinking about these ideas and actually begin putting them into practice publicly. Part of what made that feel possible was the low-risk nature of OpenSpaces itself. There was no requirement for significant financial investment, the Visual Artists Association lent the credibility of its wider platform, and artists were provided with practical tools and guidance that helped the overall offering feel professional and supported rather than intimidating. Although every artist approaches OpenSpaces differently, the experience helped me better understand how my own values, interests and ways of working could themselves become central to how and where I chose to share the practice publicly. More importantly, it gave me a structure that helped me stop endlessly overthinking and simply begin acting on ideas in a way that still felt professional, supported and achievable. Committing to a public date also mattered psychologically. Knowing the Visual Artists Association would be promoting the event meant I felt accountable in a positive way and far less able to retreat back into hesitation or endless preparation. I was also no longer approaching public visibility alone, but as part of a wider group of artists all showing up together and navigating similar feelings of uncertainty alongside one another. In many ways, it reduced some of my usual ‘get out of jail’ options around visibility and forced me to trust the process more fully. Looking back, I realise much of my earlier education focused heavily on critical thinking and concept development, but far less on the practical realities of how artists actually begin navigating public visibility and participation. In many ways, the Visual Artists Association gave me a kind of practical crib sheet for stepping into that world more confidently.

At the same time, OpenSpaces helped propel my professional practice in ways I had not fully anticipated. The visibility created through the programme led to opportunities, including a local BBC radio interview discussing the flax project and connections with local civic organisations and representatives, including being invited to contribute ideas towards the town's City of Culture ambitions. I think experiences like this also demonstrated how opening your work publicly can create unexpected conversations, visibility, and opportunities for artists more broadly, often in ways that are difficult to predict in advance.

The ideas and approaches explored through OpenSpaces 2025 have continued to develop in my Arts Council England supported project, 'Irregular Thread’. Looking back, I feel certain that the experience of publicly testing and discussing the work through OpenSpaces helped strengthen both my confidence and the project's broader development before applying for National Lottery Project Grant funding through Arts Council England. Public engagement, shared making and knowledge exchange now sit at the centre of the work. Through community events, demonstrations, artist talks, and participatory activities linked to projects such as Derbyshire Makes, the practice has continued to expand through direct encounters with both local communities and other artists. That ongoing exchange feels important because it keeps the work open, responsive and connected to wider conversations around contemporary textile practice, socially engaged art and alternative approaches to making.

Looking back now, the conversation reinforced something I have been gradually recognising through my flax practice and community work in Derbyshire. Meaningful creative activity does not always begin in formal cultural spaces or fully resolved ideas. Sometimes it begins with uncertainty, experimentation and a decision to start with whatever is available around you. A patch of flax growing in a front garden can gradually open into public workshops, artist discussions, shared acts of making, gathered collections of fibre, and ongoing reflections on material, land, labour, and participation.

In many ways, that feels closely connected to what OpenSpaces itself is encouraging. Not the idea that artists need to arrive fully formed or completely confident, but the understanding that opening your work to others can itself become part of the creative process.

If there is one thing I took from OpenSpaces 2025, it is that sometimes the most important step is simply saying yes and turning up before you feel completely ready. What stayed with me was discovering that I was not doing that alone, but alongside a supportive tribe of artists, all navigating similar fears, uncertainties, ambitions, and hopes. For anyone quietly hesitating at the edges of OpenSpaces 2026 and wondering whether they are ready enough, experienced enough or confident enough, I would simply say this: say yes. You and your practice are worth showing up for, wherever you happen to find yourself starting from.