Commissioned by UCL Arbor Arts Programme
How can tactile and sensory experience help individuals reshape, reinterpret, and transform the fabric of past traumatic memory?
In Threads of Memory, I’m collaborating with PhD neuroscience researcher Dr Lianne Keighery as part of UCL’s Arbor Arts programme—an initiative that connects artists, researchers, and communities with lived experience of neurological conditions. Together, we’re developing a multi-sensory textile installation, co-created with a London-based community group living with trauma and/or PTSD.
Rooted in Lianne’s research on memory reconsolidation in the brain’s sensory networks, and my experience in tactile, participatory textile practice, our work explores how the act of making can support emotional healing, resilience and collective care. Through a series of gentle, trauma-informed workshops, participants will be invited to sketch, stitch, and shape their own tactile testaments to memory—embedding lived experience into fabric.
These individual pieces will come together to form a sensory installation for UCL’s new world-class Centre for Translational Neuroscience, March 2026. This modular, ever-shifting artwork will offer visitors a space to reflect, feel, and connect—through the physical and metaphorical threads of textiles and the invisible neural memory networks.
This project marks an important shift in my creative journey. As someone with dyslexia, I’ve often felt anxious and out of place in academic spaces. But through Arbor—and my collaboration with Lianne—they have offered me a way in. Together, we’re embracing embodied, experiential learning rooted in conversation, creativity, and making. We’re exploring how knowledge can become not just accessible, but sensory and touchable—using art to nurture neurological wellbeing and create meaningful, real-world impact.
