Tender 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 resulting exhibition brings together selected works created by participants, presented alongside a new site-responsive piece by Sahra Hersi.

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, indigo deepening in colour as it meets air, 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 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 slowly, through time, exposure, and interaction.

Although rooted in the specific experiences of the Adanna Women’s Support Group, the project sits within a wider practice concerned with material processes, spatial storytelling, and the cultural significance of craft.