Created for Unravelling Nymans at Nymans House and Gardens with the National Trust, these sculptural interventions respond to the overlooked histories of children evacuated to the estate during the Second World War.

​

Focusing on the lives of those temporarily displaced to Nymans, the work considers the uneasy proximity between childhood and conflict. One evacuee, P. Clover, would later join the armed forces, collapsing the distance between refuge and participation in war.

​

Rifle, positioned at the threshold of the house, marks this tension directly: a quiet reminder that those seeking safety were on the cusp of the very violence they had escaped.

​

Both Rifle and Slingshot are hand-carved in limewood, their forms developed through drawing and iterative making, echoing the logic of a child’s game of “broken telephone,” where meaning shifts through repetition. Dyed to match the tones of school uniforms, the works carry a subdued, institutional palette.

​

Conceived as toys, they sit between innocence and implication, objects of play that gesture toward conflict. Slingshot, placed in the hands of a garden cherub, subtly disrupts the pastoral setting, transforming a symbol of purity into one of quiet mischief and latent aggression.

​

Play becomes a lens through which histories of displacement, fear, and becoming are reframed.