These props were made during my residency at HMP Springhill with IKON Gallery and the Rothschild Foundation.

Prop I. The mask is made to be worn. It is a prop for grieving. In their cells, the men put it on and became birds, caught in the restless pull of zugunruhe, the migratory agitation that pulls them toward home. It is within the fixed geometry of the prison that the body rehearses movement it cannot take. This mask is a small permission to borrow another creature’s time, another creature’s sense of direction. It is not disguise but substitution, a placeholder for flight, for elsewhere, for the idea of home that lives in instinct rather than location. Behind it, the face is both present and suspended in waiting. Within HMP Springhill, the mask carries the memory of those brief transformations. It holds the moment when a man becomes a bird who cannot migrate, a cuckoo marking time inside an architecture that isn’t home. The mask becomes an object of mourning and rehearsal: grief for the homes left behind, and a fragile imagining of homes waiting or unknown.

Prop II. The shirt has been taken apart at its seams and sewn back together again. In the channels where thread once simply joined cloth, stones have been laid, one by one, altering the weight of the garment. Each stitch ends in a bead of Job’s tears, small seeds that look like their biblical namesake’s tears held suspended. A shirt is usually a second skin, a measure of a body’s daily life. Here it becomes a container of memory and burden. The stones recall the act of placing stones for remembrance and also the quiet carrying of grief, held close and stitched into the fabric of what we wear. The shirt no longer hangs lightly. It pulls, it settles, it remembers gravity. It speaks of mourning home not as a single loss but as a series of small weights borne along the seams of blended days. Each thread finishes in a tear that does not fall, marking a labour of repair that can never return the garment to what it was, only to what it has become: a body of cloth that holds absence, and keeps it close.

Photographed by Tod Jones, courtesy of IKON Gallery Birmingham