SOFT RIND

I’ve started a mail club!

Nem 🐬 — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 14:31:11 GMT

I’ve seen other creators doing this and it seems like a cool way for people to support me and receive some nice things in the post once a month. I’m looking forward to making some lovely bits for you. These will include patches, prints, stickers, and talismans.

To get things started I’m offering 50% off to all new customers for the next week (automatically applied at checkout). Head to my website to join!

Soft Mail Club

Laminating Is Freezing Time

Nem 🐬 — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:33:54 GMT

I think synchronicities are opportunities to return to ourselves.

A strange and magical coincidence offers a path back to a version of ourselves that has been forgotten or lost or blocked somehow.

When I’m feeling stuck or the darkness is descending, I make my way outside because that’s where the magic happens. I never go out with the intention of findi…

Blue Birthday

Nem 🐬 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 20:43:45 GMT

A few years ago my younger brother wrote a song called ‘It’s My Birthday’. It’s a song about the blissful naivety of a birthday celebration enjoyed somewhere between the saccharine celebrations of childhood and the disappointing ones of adulthood. At least that’s my interpretation of it. Despite the joyful subject matter, there is a sadness. I catch out…

Not another paradise

Nem 🐬 — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 20:39:25 GMT

I experienced longing exactly three times last week. Or at least that’s how many times I noticed. I’m trying to make more of an effort to be aware when I feel the warming sensation of wanting something I can’t have. I say warming - sometimes it feels like ice spreading itself in a thin layer across my chest.

I want something I can’t have. Not only that, …

What if Rorschach was onto something?

Nem 🐬 — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 22:21:43 GMT

I am developing a tool.

What do you see when you look at this image?

I don’t know when I started labelling images, but I can say for certain that it is the least contrived aspect of my practice.

You know when you’re journaling, and it’s like a new version of your self comes out? It feels like an old friend and you think ‘we must stay in touch’, but when…

How to find the sacred (online)

Nem 🐬 — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 09:18:46 GMT

No Platitudes

Nem 🐬 — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 15:41:52 GMT

How sad that I avoided writing about my dead friend because it felt like a cliche.

When someone dies, all the platitudes come out to play. I think we use platitudes because they work. They do a good job at expressing a feeling.

I want to believe that we reach for cliches because we are efficiency seekers, because collectively we harbour a desire to ease …

Magic & leaving the house

Nem 🐬 — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 13:21:01 GMT

I did write today. I wrote this. It’s getting easier - the writing. The last thing I wanted to do was write this, all I wanted to do was eat jaffa cakes and watch my show in bed, but I made myself write. This is good. This is progress.

I keep thinking about the woman in the house on the arts trail. She told me something she used to tell her kids - ‘You …

Resistance to resistance

Nem 🐬 — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 17:46:03 GMT

Yesterday felt like a big day. When I got home it all felt like too much to write about, so I’ve waited until this morning.

If you’ve not been keeping up with my writings, you won’t know that I’m trying out a thing where I write diary style; spilling my thoughts out and posting them unedited. This is an att

empt to change the style in which I post on here. I’d started to feel like posting was a burden and it was interfering with the joy of writing. So for a month or so, this will all feel like an unpolished space.

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I’m trying to not think too hard about what I’m writing and to not worry what people will think. Oftentimes I’ll get stuck trying to think of the perfect and most unique way of saying something that I’ll end up not writing anything at all. I don’t want it to be like that, so I’m trying this.

Yesterday I went to the MA fine art final show. I walked over there to see how long it would take me. It took about an hour to walk to one of the campuses, and an hour and a half to walk to the other. I need to start riding my bike. In fact, when I was leaving the exhibition I met one of the students whose work I’d just been looking at and she told me her best bit of advice for the course is to get a bike.

I have a resistance to riding my bike. I’m not sure why. It feels like too much work to get all the stuff together - the lock, the helmet, spare clothes for if I get too sweaty. I’m not sure how to fix this resistance. I feel resistant to the resistance.

On my way home I found a baby oak tree that someone was giving away. It was in one of those little gift bags with the ribbon handles and so I picked it up and walked on with it. When I got back to my neighbourhood I realised there was an arts trail happening. I decided to go to one of the houses on the trail, since it was only round the corner from my home. The front door was open and the house was full of this persons paintings. Inside a group of women sat talking, one of them remarked on my beautiful oak tree and the ease with which I had been able to pick it up and keep walking. Another woman entered and asked me when I had found it - I told her where and that there had been another one with it. She rushed out to go and look for it. Just then, the woman who owned the house (and whose art work was on display), entered from the garden. We spoke about my tree, of course, and about her work. I told her about the MA and it turned out her lodger had just finished the same degree - I had just seen her work at the show.

The work consisted of footage of the abandoned chocolate factory I am so familiar with, as well as interviews with locals. It felt grounded in the neighbourhood I call home, and it felt like an important moment to have stumbled upon this sign of the interconnected nature of our lives. The home owner and artist gave me her details and told me to come round and talk about art with her. While we were talking, her cat came in with a mouse in it’s mouth.

I’m thinking a lot about sculpture. I want to make something useful. I understand why people make bowls and cups and such - for their utility. It must be cool to design and make buildings too, they serve a purpose. Sometimes I think I am struggling when making art for arts sake, when really I should be making art to serve a purpose. Something that can contain something else, even if that something is an idea. This might be a breakthrough. This might be what Ursula Le Guin was talking about in ‘Carrier Bag Theory’. A story is a receptacle in which ideas are held. In the same way, a sculpture is a vehicle for an idea, or a feeling, or a way of thinking.

I found an egg today

Nem 🐬 — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 23:03:12 GMT

This is a diary and I will be treating it as such. I found an egg in the graveyard today. I wrapped it in tin foil and bought it home. I will have to clean it somehow and then I will add it to my tray of bits. I started the tray last year using things I had bought home from walks in nature.

I pulled the tray out from under my bed today to sort through it…

Elements & an altar

Nem 🐬 — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 21:48:23 GMT

It’s the first day back at school and I’m tired already. It’s darkish. It’s raining. It’s autumn. There’s a feeling to all this and I recognise it. Yesterday I was thinking about water a lot. There’s a cave up north where water drips from the ceiling and if you suspend something in the stream of water it becomes ‘petrified’ over time. The water turns th…

Marmite jar full of stones

Nem 🐬 — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 21:27:41 GMT

Something ancient in my bones. I feel it when I wake up and don’t go on my phone. There’s something brutally honest about my scrunched up eyes, looking up at the skylight, forcing themselves open. I drink my water like a faithful nymph.

I’m desperate for some force to act upon me. Something big and strong. I think it’s time to give myself over to the ri…

Sunshine all the way

Nem 🐬 — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 20:58:10 GMT

I’m trying a thing where I write without filtering and post it without editing. I don’t know if this is the kind of thing you signed up for but I hope you enjoy it regardless. I’ve not been posting because I’m overthinking everything I write. Writing has become a chore and I dread sitting down to write. I’m seeing this an an exercise in learning to writ…

Men with flowers

Nem 🐬 — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 23:07:11 GMT

Men on the street carrying flowers is a symbol of hope. I love when I catch one looking vulnerable, I think those might be my favourite. I also love it when I take a photo and I’m behind the camera so I don’t realise it but they happen to be looking right at me. Those photos come out great because they either look as if they are posing with the flowers,…

Drifting vs Shifting

Nem 🐬 — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 11:20:23 GMT

I have drifted so far from where I want to be with my practice. Consider this a recalibration.

Back when I was creating the conversations with different parts of myself - the interactions - things felt good. It felt like I was on the right track and exploring what I wanted to explore. But there was still an element of it that was pandering to an audienc…

Soft Symbols Workshop

Nem 🐬 — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 18:01:35 GMT

I am running a workshop for finding your symbols. It’s being hosted at Ethereal Maison Gallery, Bethnal Green, on 11/06 at 16:00. That’s in one weeks time! It’s going to be a beautiful evening filled with creative exercises for identifying and exploring your own personal symbols. There will also be crafting, in which you will be able to make your own sy…

April is the sweetest month

Nem 🐬 — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 18:14:28 GMT

‘A garden as big as the park.’

I asked my son what his ideal garden would be. His response pushed up against the imaginary boundaries I had constructed in my mind. I felt this odd resistance to it. I wanted to tell him no, and explain that his answer went beyond the perimeters of what was possible. But I stopped myself and let him wander in his imaginati…

Son Shaped

Nem 🐬 — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 19:43:09 GMT

If my son were a fungus he would grow in the dark. Instead he grows towards the light.

I have been taught, somewhere along the way, that great work can only be achieved in solitude. I think we buy into this idea because it’s easier, but also because the lesson has deep roots. If mothers are to be included in the art world, we must uproot the idea that the only good work comes from some romanticised alone time in a picturesque studio. Not only do we need to uproot this idea but we must put salt on the ground so it can’t grow back.

All my best work has been created in the same space as my son. In fact I think my greatest work of art is the laughter we make together. This is not an exaggeration, and I have not said it for poetics. When we are laughing together it’s the most creative, the most free, the most joyful version of myself I can be. I’m toying with the idea of documenting our laughter in some way. Though I don’t necessarily want to interfere with it’s natural rhythms, I think it could be nice to pay homage to it, to amplify it. I’m thinking about recording our laughter. Each instance caught on tape and labeled. We could keep the tapes in categories and refer back to them. Like little time capsules of joy.

If I were a good mother I would bottle his laughter.

If I were a good mother and a good artist, I would weave my son into everything I do.

15 reminders you're alive

Nem 🐬 — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 19:33:56 GMT

Looking back on an old project and remembering the passion that made it happen. (Feels like seeing yourself from the outside.)
Waiting for mail (patiently).
Laughing alone in bed whilst waiting to fall asleep.
Thinking of a really good succinct way of expressing something.
Realising you haven’t thought about someone in a while.
When you let your mind be …

If you don't know, now you know

Nem 🐬 — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 23:23:32 GMT

In 1999 my mum found a diamond shaped crisp in a packet of hula hoops. She sent it off wrapped in tissue paper in a white envelope. She said that surely it was worth a prize. This is how I learned to believe in the power of ritual.

The following year at the turn of the millennium, I tore up newspapers and covered the living room floor in shreds of paper. I picked up bundles of scraps and threw them into the air, my little hands turned black from the inky pages. I didn’t know what celebrating looked like but I tried my best. At the stroke of midnight my stepdad carried me around the block on his shoulders. I guess he didn’t know what celebrating looked like either.

I’ve always put my faith in rituals, for better or worse. There’s this song by the band Easter and the very last line goes ‘I wonder if life would have been any different without ceremony.’ I’ve held onto that for some reason. Not because I want to perform some surgical procedure to separate faith from doubt. But because I think it speaks to the beauty in doing things just for the sake of it. Would life have been any different? I don’t know. As Biggie Smalls said ‘If you don’t know, now you know.’