Contemporary Community Textile Artist Derbyshire UK
Collaboration Kindness Carbon Sensitivity
Phoenix From The Bin
A Year Of Vulnerability
Found Materials, Vulnerability And A Portable Textile Shrine
Period
2024–2025
My Role
Artist
Project Type
Individual Textile Research Project
Location
Derbyshire and Beyond
Project Overview
Phoenix From The Bin grew over roughly a year in Derbyshire and beyond as a portable hand stitched textile artwork made from found, gifted and repurposed materials. I began it as a deliberate experiment in vulnerability. If I was asking people in community projects to try unfamiliar things, make themselves visible and risk getting something wrong, I felt I needed to practise some of that discomfort myself.
Practising Vulnerability Through Stitch
I set myself a few rules. The work had to be portable enough to travel with me, the tools had to be simple, and the materials had to be found, repurposed or carry a personal meaning. Most importantly, I wanted to stop editing out the things that felt awkward or too revealing. I wrote about that process while the piece was still uncertain in my Embracing Vulnerability blog.
Found, Gifted & Repurposed Materials
The piece gathered fragments as I travelled, worked and met people. Everyday materials became a record of place, conversation and feeling. Rather than starting with a fixed finished image, I allowed the textile to accumulate. That made the work slower and more personal, but it also linked directly to the resourceful material approach that has become increasingly important across my practice.
The Back Matters
I became as interested in the reverse as the front. The back exposes the knots, joins and routes taken by the thread, and I chose not to tidy that away. For a work about vulnerability, it felt wrong to present only the polished surface. Showing the messy side made the piece more truthful about how it had been made and about the year it was carrying.
From Private Experiment To Coventry Open
Submitting the work was part of the experiment because there was no guarantee that anybody else would want to see it. Phoenix From The Bin was then selected for Coventry Open 2025 at Herbert Art Gallery and Museum. The official Coventry Open 2025 artist directory lists the piece among the exhibition artists. That movement from a private, uncertain object to a public gallery work gave the project a different ending from the one I could have planned at the start.
Working with found, gifted and discarded material sits within my wider sustainability practice, where reuse is part of the artistic method as well as a practical material choice. Being selected for Coventry Open 2025 also brought the story back around to my earlier Coventry Open community outreach work in 2023, when I had encouraged others to apply, applied myself and was not selected.
