(Tower Hamlets, London, 2025)

RICAMI is a six-week embroidery and conversation workshop for new mothers navigating postpartum isolation, identity shifts, and emotional vulnerability. Designed as a soft entry point into connection, the project uses collective making as a tool for care, reflection, and belonging.

Participants are invited to attend with their babies and engage in a structured yet gentle process combining embroidery, guided conversation, and shared reflection. Each session moves from individual expression to collective authorship, culminating in the creation of a communal textile: a quilt or banner that holds fragments of lived experience, stitched together into a shared narrative.

Rooted in research on arts and health, RICAMI approaches creative practice not as output but as a method of processing, enabling participants to navigate transitions, articulate what is difficult to say, and build meaningful social bonds in a non-clinical setting.

The project culminates in a public presentation and conversation, where the collective artwork becomes both an archive of maternal experience and a platform to reflect on motherhood, care, and community.

Embroidery Artist Lead & Co-Facilitator: Joanne Kelly

Joanne Kelly is an MA Art and Politics graduate from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her sculptural practice weaves in union banner traditions, feminist embroidery, and textiles to explore grief and memory. Her work includes a banner honouring her mother, Jane Loftus, the first woman elected President of the Communication Workers Union, whose achievements continue to inspire Joanne both personally and politically.

Themes: wellbeing · motherhood · belonging
Status: Starting on April 2026

Upcoming sessions

April-May 2026 - John Smith Family Hub / Children’s Centre
June 2026 - Stepney City Farm
July & August 2026 - St Margaret’s House, taster sessions
September 2026 - St Margaret’s House, Around Poplar Children’s Centre

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DOTTA is a series of small-group, baby-friendly facilitated sessions for mothers with infants under one year old, held within some of London’s leading museums and galleries. Emerging from the recognition that early motherhood can be profoundly isolating, the project offers a gentle and accessible way to engage with art in a supportive, shared environment.

Each session brings together a small group of women and their babies, where artworks are used as starting points for conversation rather than objects to be explained. Through guided reflection, participants are invited to explore themes of identity, motherhood, and emotional wellbeing, without pressure to speak or perform.

Moving away from both formal art education and clinical frameworks, DOTTA positions cultural participation as a form of connection and care. It creates space not only for looking, but for pausing, sharing, and being alongside others in a similar life stage.

Over time, fragments of these conversations - words, sentences, and reflections - are gathered and developed into a collective zine, published on a three-month cycle, forming a shared narrative of an often isolating experience.

DOTTA is both a cultural experience and a soft, community-based intervention for maternal wellbeing.

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(Venice / London, 2024)

Apolidia is a group exhibition exploring how contemporary artists relate to the idea of “motherland” through lived experiences of conflict, coloniality, statelessness, and diaspora. Bringing together 15 artists from regions including Syria, Ukraine, Ethiopia, Palestine, and beyond, the project creates a space where personal histories intersect with global political realities.

Rather than separating aesthetics from context, Apolidia foregrounds art as a form of testimony - where each work becomes an expression of displacement, belonging, and identity shaped by political conditions. The exhibition operates as both a research platform and a site of visibility, amplifying voices often excluded from dominant cultural narratives.

Through collective storytelling and diverse artistic practices, Apolidia invites audiences to engage with complex geopolitical experiences on an intimate level, fostering dialogue across difference without collapsing disagreement.

Artists: Ahmad Al-Miqdad (Syria) · Ananiya Zerihun (Ethiopia) · Ben Tuge (Zimbabwe/South Africa) · Dasha Brian (Belarus/Poland) · Eva Holts (Ukraine/Slovakia) · Judy Mashnouk (Syria) · Khadija Baker (Kurdistan/Canada) · Maria Gvardeitseva (Belarus/UK) · Mohammed Salim Khan (Rohingya, Bangladesh) · Rand Alkatreeb (Syria/Italy) · Samaa Emad (Palestine) · Shiren Hussain (Syria) · Suleiman Suleiman (Syria/Italy) · Tamara Safarova (Ukraine) · Yazan AlGhraowi (Syria)

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Themes: displacement · identity · cultural memory
Partners: The Pinna · Municipality of Venice, Avapo Mestre
Status: Completed

Who Owns the Land online show reflected on belonging, ecology, and power.
The project questioned who has the right to define a territory, politically, culturally, and emotionally.
Through dialogue between art, research, and activism, it revealed how land becomes both home and struggle.

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Themes: land · visibility · postcolonial identity
Status: Completed