This project explores how textiles can act as soft architecture to preserve collective memory. With an interest in the connection between people and the space they live in, especially how personal and collective memories are held within urban environments.

By looking at both Seoul and London, the work reflects on how redevelopment in Seoul has removed local identity and erased layers of memory. It often feels like living on top of someone else’s compressed and lost memories.

The research asks whether textiles can offer a practical and emotional way to keep these memories alive. Using light, layering, and sensory materials, the work aims to create textile-based structures that connect past and present, evoking memory through sensory and spatial experience. These structures hold layered traces of memory, life, and time embedded in everyday spaces, like a palimpsest.

This project was part of a collaboration between Reed Smith LLP and Chelsea College of Arts.
MA Textile Design and BA Product & Furniture Design students were invited to develop artworks for Reed Smith’s new offices at Blossom Yard, Spitalfields, on display from September 2025 to September 2026.

The project aims to encourage creative responses inspired by Reed Smith’s key industry sectors — Shipping, Financial Services, Energy, Entertainment & Media, and Life Sciences — as well as the historical and architectural context of Spitalfields.

Selected works include 2D wall-based pieces and a limited number of 3D installations, displayed throughout the two floors of the building.

The collaboration provides a platform for emerging artists to showcase experimental, site-specific works within a professional environment.

This project was inspired by the historic Blossom Yar and Reed Smith building. Prints were developed by referencing artefacts and textures from the site, drawing on its silk trade heritage and history of social exchange. Translucent materials such as silk organza were used to explore how light, shadow, and overlapping fabrics can evoke time and memory, reflecting the layered histories emedded in the space. The work aims to bridge past and present, allowing histories and people to coexist within the same space. Through layered structures and multisensory interaction, the piece seeks to preserve collective memory within the built environment.