Artist Statement

A meditation on softness as strength; on what endures without hardening.

This body of work explores maternal attachment, emotional survival, vulnerability, and the ways women carry difficult experiences within the body. Constructed through repetitive handwork using hand felted wool, stitching, wrapping, knotting and binding, the soft sculptures operate as both objects and emotional systems.

The works emerged during a time of profound psychological strain connected to caregiving, mental health crises, and the complex emotional entanglements that can exist between mother and child. Repetition became both process and regulation — a tactile form of self-soothing, repair, containment and endurance.

Across the exhibition, softness functions simultaneously as tenderness and armour. Threads extend, bind, fray and reconnect. Some forms appear protective; others suggest emotional over-identification, dependence, exhaustion or resilience. The work resists fixed definitions of pathology or care, instead inhabiting the unstable territory between love, responsibility, fear and survival.

Through fibre, scale and touch, these sculptural forms transform a private emotional experience into a shared material language.

Please Email Jacqui Fink for further enquiries.