Re-membering Delight
Last year I read British contemporary artist David Mankin's beautiful book Remembering in Paint, and attended an in-person workshop with him. One thing struck me more than anything else: how much of his creative process is built from things he loves doing — walking the shoreline, collecting flotsam, reading artists' biographies and poetry, and creative play, destruction, and experimentation. Not just painting techniques or theory — but his curiosities, his pleasures. It got me asking: what do I love doing — beyond the art-making — that I could bring into my creative process?
Re-membering as a creative practice
The word re-membering comes from the work of anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, later developed by Lorraine Hedtke in her grief support work. Re-membering isn't passive nostalgia or wistful looking-back. It's an active, creative process of choosing and re-assembling treasured relationships and parts of ourselves that had become dis-membered. It’s about reflecting on questions like:
What relationships, values, experiences, and ways of being do I want to carry forward with me?
What do I treasure enough to keep re-integrating into who I am now?
How can I actively weave them back into my daily life, what I'm creating, and who I'm becoming?
Searching for, or creating, treasure
When I sat with these questions, two memories surfaced.
The first was treasure-hunting. We used to holiday at a seaside camping spot where my grandparents kept a permanent caravan, and my favourite place in the world was the shoreline — searching for shells, crouched over rock pools, looking for sea anemones. I could lose hours there. It was meditative and thrilling all at once, this quiet, patient searching for small, specific wonders.
The second was transforming things. I'd find old frames or bits of small furniture, sand them down, paint them, give them a new life or a new purpose. I still love this — the edit, the moment of looking at something ordinary or discarded and imagining what it could become. Shells turned into jewellery. Dried flowers and seed pods turned into art. Second hand clothes altered. Found things, made new. I love the thrill of seeing something in a new way.
Small Serendipities
Small Serendipities is a new collection of small mixed media collage artworks I've been working on, made from repurposed offcuts and colour and medium testers left over from creating other paintings. In making them, I re-member my childhood delight in meditative searching and playful re-purposing.
The word serendipity is about the gift of finding unexpected beauty, meaning, or delight in places you weren't expecting. That resonates deeply with my years working as a grief therapist, and my own experiences of loss, illness, and disability. Those experiences have taught me that life so often asks us to create from what remains rather than from what we wished we still had.
These little artworks reconnect me with a child who already knew how to do this long before I had words for it. Looking through what is left. Believing that something beautiful is already waiting there. Choosing playful delight over the pursuit of perfection.
“Salty Splashes and Cherry Gelato” (2026). Recycled studio scraps on paper. 20 × 20cm. Currently on exhibit and available to purchase at Museum Haus Des Papiers, Berlin.
What wants to come with you?
Many of us quietly leave behind the very things that once made us feel most alive. Not because we choose to, but because growing up asks us to become efficient, capable, productive. Somewhere along the way we stop collecting shells, sticks, stones, and feathers. We stop building things. We stop climbing trees, pressing flowers into books, making tiny worlds, searching rock pools, drawing maps, writing stories, or rearranging furniture just to see what happens.
But those delights wait to be re-membered. Not as nostalgia, but as living practices that can enrich our lives in new ways now.
Questions for re-membering delight
What activities could you happily lose hours doing as a child?
What kinds of places made you feel most alive?
What did you search for, collect, build, notice, or make?
What did that activity give you — was it the searching, the making, the moving, the quiet, the company?
What qualities were those activities growing in you? Curiosity? Wonder? Patience? Adventure? Care? Playfulness?
Which of those qualities feel especially needed in your life right now?
Is any version of these things you loved as a child still present in your life now? In what form?
If it's gone quiet, what would it look like to invite it back — not as a hobby to perfect, but as a practice to enjoy?
What small practice could you re-member into your life this week?
Perhaps, like searching through a box of studio scraps, those beloved discarded parts of ourselves are still there. Waiting patiently to be found and re-membered into our lives in some new and delightful way.
