My Mother left me a wealth of materials and fibre equipment. Mending, memory, care.

I have been thinking about how 'working from the ruins' in a personal and wider ecological sense might come together through practice. This runs with ideas that have been trickling along under the surface for many years, namely how we might account for living within dying (and vice versa), which brought me to encounter Maria Puig de la Bellacasa's work on breakdown (2021).

Breakdown exposes the vulnerability of materials, of things and their worlds, the failure of infrastructure, mechanisms, relations and systems but it is also a necessary prerequisite to healing and growth (see Puig della Bellacasa on what she terms 'breakdown ecopoethics', 2021).

For me, breakdown speaks to the relationship between life and death, this ongoing interest in my practice. It isn't a story of despair, rather it is one of hope, a story in which we are active collaborators in remediation with more-than-human beings. There is an opportunity here to foster this hope through an imaginary of life that draws attention to breakdown as an essential part of ongoing life-giving processes.

I am working on a longer piece of writing to think through these ideas further and to reflect on what this might mean in terms of practice. I'll post a Substack link here and on my Instagram when its come together more.