Installation at New Art Gallery Walsall. October. 2025. Image Credit: Emotive Eye
Relief
Embossed leather, moving-image, IKEA chipboard, metal embossing stamps, silver and gold embossing foil, IKEA Jumper. Paper. G-clamps, weights and shelving system
Supported by The New Art Gallery Walsall Studio Residency 2025
Relief is a long-term body of work and research expanding upon the concept of ‘relief’, engaging with relief as a multifaceted process. Reflecting on how labour, craft, and industry leave lasting impressions on place and people, from narratives around heritage to the fictions corporations tell, while asking how families and communities continue to find their own forms of relief amid economic precarity, shifting high streets, and global pressures. Relief moves between the personal and local to the global, tracing how these interconnected forces shape everyday lives.
Focusing on her hometown Walsall, once defined by its leather industry as its local identity, now often romanticised as it has declined, Drawing on connections with Hadfield Bridleworks, Walsall Gold Blockers, Sedgwick’s Leather and research at Walsall Archives, the residency culminated in moving-image works, sculptures, and writings that explore the many meanings of relief, from the physical act of embossing and blocking to the emotional and collective ways we seek release or relief.
Working with leather embossing and gold-blocking stamps made from corporate slogans of William Hill, where her dad worked on Walsall High Street, and IKEA (Junction 9), where her mom worked in the 1990s, she reimagines these impressions as sites of memory and labour. Through incorporating redundant corporate dies from Hadfield’s, once used to mark prestige onto surfaces and reworked them to question how corporations shape identity and belonging. The work aim to reveal how these histories can obscure the exploitation of workers and their role in Empire building, alongside expanding on the histories of power embedded in relief, from state propaganda to corporate branding.
Thanks to:
NAGW Zoë Lippett, Deborah Robinson, Simon Bloor, Jeremy Hunt, Hannah Anderson, Kavita Kumari and all the security staff and cleaners.
Hadfield Bridleworks: Deborah Ray, Lorraine Shail, Mick Citrullo, Donna Riley, Jan Mills, Barry Rotchell
Walsall Goldblockers: Robert Hulme
Sedgewick’s & co leatherworks: Mark Abraham and Jo Hall
Walsall Archives: Catherine Dickens
Thanks to all who attended the open studio event
