Tender Women
Spring 2025 Commission, The Women’s MuseumTender Women is a 2025 commission developed through a series of workshops with members of the Adanna Women’s Support Group. The project explores how material transformation, personal agency and lived experience can be expressed through making. The exhibition brings together selected works created by participants, presented alongside a new site-responsive piece developed for the museum.
The workshops introduced indigo dyeing, cyanotype, cross-stitch, collage and poetry. These processes have long been associated with domestic or feminised craft and have often been undervalued within mainstream art and design contexts. Here, they were approached as material systems with spatial, poetic and political potential. Their transformational qualities, such as indigo deepening in colour as it meets air and cyanotype developing through sunlight, became central to the conversations. These shifts in colour and form echoed discussions within the group about resilience, emergence and navigating life on one’s own terms.
The idea of desire lines, the informal paths created by repeated movement, shaped the wider project. This metaphor offered a way to think about intuitive decision-making and the routes people create when existing structures do not fully reflect their needs or experiences.
Across the five sessions, the workshops held space for experimentation, conversation and shared making. Participants explored themes of autonomy, care and possibility through materials that reveal themselves through time, exposure and interaction. Although rooted in the specific experiences of the Adanna group, the project sits within a wider practice concerned with material processes, spatial storytelling and the cultural significance of craft.
Workshop Series
Experimentation, Reflection, and Collective Care
The workshops were designed to offer a supportive, non-judgemental space for creative exploration. For many of the women involved, this was their first experience working with techniques such as cyanotype or indigo dyeing. Although not all identified as artists, each participant engaged with the materials and themes in ways that affirmed their voices, experiences, and aspirations.
Workshop 1 – Getting to Know Each Other
The group began by sharing stories and creating collages that reflected personal hopes and collective ambitions.
Workshop 2 – Cross-Stitching and Desire Lines
Participants learnt cross-stitch techniques and worked collaboratively to visualise the idea of desire lines through embroidery.
Workshop 3 – Indigo Dyeing and Personal Manifestos
Using wax-resist methods, each participant created an indigo-dyed napkin and wrote a short manifesto—a statement of strength, encouragement, or care for themselves and others.
Workshop 4 – Poetry and Collective Voice
Participants created individual poems using a collage method, drawing on texts by Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, and Begum Rokeya’s Sultana’s Dream. These poems were later combined to form Poem by Tender Women, a visual installation made with coloured tape.
Workshop 5 – Cyanotype Printing and Local Nature
The final session focused on cyanotype printing using local foliage. Participants worked with natural materials and light exposure to create works grounded in their immediate environment.
Exhibition and Acknowledgements
The resulting exhibition showcases a selection of works created throughout the workshop process, presented alongside a new responsive piece by Sahra Hersi. Tender Women highlights the beauty of process-led practice and the transformative potential of collective creativity.
With thanks to the women of Adanna and The Women’s Museum for their openness and generosity in sharing their stories and artworks.
Special thanks to:
Evelyn, Harjit Kaur, Liz, M.E., Ms Wu, Ronke, Shareen Akhtar, Yvette, and others who preferred to remain anonymous.
Project Team
Graphic Design: Claire Mason — @shapethepage
Fabrication and Install: Lucy Woodhouse
Curator (The Women’s Museum): Siobhán Forshaw
Commissioned by: Precious Jeffers, Cultural Programmes, London Borough of Barking & Dagenham
Photo credit: Julia Forsman