This project is an ongoing investigation into the ephemeralities and permanences of suburbia, exploring how spaces are produced through acts of regular care.

Frenchay Hospital closed in May 2014.

The NHS trust sold the land to a housing developer.

470 houses are currently being built.

I have been photographing the hospital site since it closed, on regular walks with my daughter. Both have changed quickly yet imperceptibly. When the new houses are finished it will be hard to remember this in-between time, where diggers and rubble have formed the background to our daily lives.

Using images and material from the site, I created an installation and exhibition of my own responses to this fleeting era at Frenchay museum. Local residents and visitors to the museum were invited to contribute their own memories of this transitional phase to the collection.

You can read about the project in the Journal of Cultural Geography here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08873631.2021.1913924?journalCode=rjcg20

Global Positioning Systems were invented in the service of imperialism.

So was the confinement of the mother to the home.

Residues of 18^th-century colonialism still cling to our ideas of mother, of landscape, and of nation. They are emotive and highly political (mother country, home office, domestic policy).  Romantic literature frequently frames the landscape as mother, but doesn’t leave much room for her as individual within it.

This project has had several iterations.  In 2016, in response to Brexit, I decided to hijack these tools, to talk back to big power. I ‘embroidered’ quotations about nationhood by forgotten Romantic artist-mothers in picture postcard places, finding new meanings in the relationship between their words and my location.

In 2017, I invited other people who mother to enjoy the conviviality of embroidery, to broaden ideas about who-gets-to-write-what-where in and about the British landscape and to draw attention to silences it still contains. We also hijacked another tool of war – the drone- to record the act of writing.

Recently, I was commissioned by the AHRC-funded research project Outside the Box: Outdoor Performance as Pandemic Response (https://openairperformance.com/) to create “Acts of (In)visible Repair” in Exeter. We used GPS Embroidery to address climate change and protection of biodiversity through visible mending stitches.

You can see all the embroideries here: https://www.gps-embroidery.com/

You can read more about this project here: Philps, E (2019) A global positioning system – On “finding myself”” in the Romantic Landscape,in K Johnson and J Johnston: Maternal geographies: mothering in and out of place, Bradford, Canada. Demeter Press. https://www.waterstones.com/book/maternal-geographies/jennifer-l-johnson/krista-johnston/9781772582000

Eventually we will create a multiplicity of 21st century embroideries, legacies to pass down like the domestically-produced examples from the past.

Home isn’t the only place that’s sweet.

What will you embroider?