Commissioned by UCL Arbor Arts Programme
In collaboration with PhD neuroscience researcher and
following community groups;
Castlehaven Community Centre & NHS Traumatic Stress Service
2025-2026
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’ve developed a multi-sensory workshop series and textile installation, co-created with a London-based community groups 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 come together to form a sensory installation for UCL’s Trellis Arbor showcase 2026 and elements will be adapted for UCL's new world-class Centre for Translational Neuroscience, 2028. 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.
Collaborator
Lianne Keighery | PhD Scientist
Dept. of Clinical and Movement Neurosciences
"Working with Alice for our collaboration on Touch & Trace has been nothing but a pleasure and I have thoroughly loved every moment of it. She is a genuine burst of positivity, and I seem to come away from every conversation with her feeling more energised, curious and full of ideas than when I entered it. Alice has an incredible ability to take abstract ideas and translate them into something intuitive and tangible, allowing people to engage with them on a sensory and emotional level rather than purely an intellectual one. Through working with her, I began to see science not simply as something to communicate or explain didactically, but as something that can be felt, touched, experimented with and experienced emotionally. That has made me re-evaluate what meaningful science communication can look like and has genuinely reignited my passion for finding new ways to reach people through my research. Aside from Alice's infectious personality, she is incredibly hardworking and driven, endlessly creative and seemingly never short of ideas, but she also brings a wonderful sense of playfulness, warmth and encouragement to everything she does. Alice has genuinely has influenced me as a person, as well as the way I want to work in the future. I feel very lucky that we crossed paths, and I would work with her again in a heartbeat!"
