Stitching Gardens Together is a workshop series centred around celebrating and protecting green spaces in our cities through connecting, making and gathering. Through creating a collective, compostable protest banner, we will learn from the stories of the earth at Morden Hall as well as across London, and express our care for the importance of maintaining and creating diverse, community-centred gardens and ecological spaces amongst the concrete streets.
Two-part workshop to create a collective protest banner to celebrate and ensure protection and creation of community gardens in London
Part 1: Seeding New Futures: Seed paper making workshop to create a collective protest banner using old paper and wildflower seeds. Creating observational drawings of local flowers found within the wonderful National Trust Morden Hall park.
Part 2: Stitching Gardens Together: Create and adorn the protest banner made from wild seed paper that's been stitched together. Using embroidery, drawing and writing to celebrate and campaign for the protection of wild plants and green community spaces in London.
AS part of GROW URBAN FESTIVAL 8th-16th June hosted by NT Morden Hall National Trust
A Zine where Art and Growing intersects, exploring ideas around creating communities around how we feed ourselves physically and mentally, create organic environments and give ourselves a much-needed place to nourish our souls. Growing with each other, understanding the importance of connecting, educating, nurturing and healing whilst being in nature.
Documenting a two-year project 'Cultivate Create' that I had the pleasure of being the lead Artist-gardener on working alongside Mattie O’Callaghan delivering a programme of fortnightly workshops, promoting family resilience, wellness and giving access to much needed green space in North Kensington we created the Zine together as a record of our time there.
Cultivate Create is a creative growing project for North Kensington families with a focus on wellbeing and emotional resilience. It provides a safe, non-judgmental space for families in which to be creative and connect to nature.
Since April 2022 families in North Kensington have been working with creative gardeners Romany Taylor and Mattie O’Callaghan to cultivate an edible garden and nurture the biodiversity of ACAVA’s Maxilla Walk Studios yard and the adjoining Maxilla Forest School Garden. Connecting together art and nature, we have been running family-led sessions including gardening, natural dyeing, cooking with our harvests, drawing, painting, playing, making, crocheting, weaving, working with clay, sculpting, weaving and storytelling.
We have collaborated with Elysian Roots/Grow2know, Chelsea Physic Garden, Fulham Palace Gardens, The Westway Trust, Meanwhile Gardens and The Nourish Hub.
Cultivate Create is a partnership with the NHS North Kensington Healthier Futures with support from Ernst & Young.
Marian Court - An exhibition
After a 6 month residency that Snooze Fabric held at Marian Court, they created a body of work to reflect their time there. Creating a programme of events under the title ‘Think.Make.Create’ they linked up with their network of artists to hold workshops for the remaining 12 families housed in the estate. The workshops comprised Photography, Spoken Word, Poetry, Art, Illustration and Handcrafts. Tailoring each workshop to an audience that could relate to it the most. The community flat in which they worked became a hive of creativity with the local families becoming very involved in the activities.
The work created acts as a eulogy to a space that existed and held significance for its inhabitants.
Contemplating how we invest in, and build communities only to dismantle them expecting resilience, optimism and hope.
Proverbs 24:3-4
By wisdom a house is built,
Through understanding it is established.
Through knowledge its rooms are filled with rare and beautiful treasures
Dealing with her own deeply personal grief at the time, Romany focused on the imagined space within the empty flats using repetitive, time-consuming and painstakingly laborious work to create a much needed meditative mindset. Employing techniques such as origami to represent how grief changes the very shape of you, how you exist but in a different form. Using symbolism that represents eternal life, the soul journeying to another world, hope and healing in challenging times.
Wall hangings often found in these very homes were also used as inspiration for banners of protest to voice feelings of frustration and anger of displaced and fragmented communities. the themes used intertwined the oncoming demolition of the building, the fracturing of a community and the uncertain future of the inhabitants, creating undeniable links between the idea of the house representing your soul and self and how feelings of loss, displacement, and despair combine at our most vulnerable points in life.
Haringey Feast brought together Haringey’s creators, cultural organisations, and residents to celebrate everything creative then unique borough has to offer. These events and workshops built up to a spectacular free celebration of Haringey’s creativity at Alexandra Palace on Sunday 19 November 2023.
Romany Taylor created neck warmers incorporating plant dyed yarns and elements of crochet. Ensuring the most vulnerable were able to keep toasty warm at the event with British sourced lambswool, renowned for its insulating properties she created a functional piece of wearable art and craftsmanship, utilising pattern and colour to reflect the vibrancy and diversity of the borough and a poem that connected all the pieces together.
The plant dyed yarns and crochet workshops formed part of the neck warmers showcased at Alexander Palace for Haringey Feast. The neck warmers were donated to homeless shelter, Mulberry Junction in Haringey.
In the lead up to the day there were free workshops and maker classes, led by local creatives. Held across the borough, in schools, libraries, care homes, arts venues and community centres and more.
On the day, large banquet-style tables were set up in the East Court at Alexandra Palace to welcome guests to the three uniquely curated programmes which happened on the day. Haringey Feast featured performances, art, culture and soup, with recipes written by local community groups exclusively for the Feast.
Haringey Feast was funded by the Mayor of London Cultural Impact Award, as part of the Mayor of London’s Borough of Culture programme.
A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process or to act as a thing to be replicated or learned from; the idea is to create many from one.
Within the fashion industry, the sampling phase is the most expensive, laboured over, experimental part of the process. Painstakingly hand made by Romany, a small collection of pieces that illustrate this process in an amplified way. Each style is effectively a toile, a first prototype, with no pattern being made, no fabric swatch, or initial sketch. All emphasis is placed on technique and working directly with the mannequin, which can be likened to ‘draping’ of the couturier.
Accompanying drawings mirror the collection, by recreating the artistry of the garments with untraditional poses and a regular woman as the model, inexpensive materials used to create these one-off illustrations that are usually photographed, mass produced for magazines.
Photographs are purely here to document and record the result.
The purpose was to design and make a collection of ‘Couture’ knitwear that is not reproducible, garments that are labour intensive and completely unique using leftover materials from luxury fashion houses.
To challenge perception of a raw material and a craft by using it an unexpected way, celebrating a skillset and exhibiting the craftsmanship of what an individual can produce.
To show Clothing as Art, without its value being diminished just because its purpose is to clothe the body as opposed to decorating a wall.
To give value to the actual work involved as opposed to whom its supposedly ‘designed’ by. We worship fashion houses often where the original founding designer has no part of the process or are even deceased sometimes its been sold to shareholders. Instead, a nameless team of people work on creating products with little to no recognition of their talent.
