Try a Little Tenderness

Hannah Macfarlane and Amber Alcock

Front Gallery: 20.11.25 - 15.01.26

What does ‘care’ mean in a world where apathy has become a form of protection? In Try a Little Tenderness, artists Hannah Macfarlane and Amber Alcock explore fragility, care and hope as quiet acts of resistance. Their work meets in a shared fascination with the tender and the strange—where beauty and unease intertwine

Both artists use slow, tactile processes as a way of thinking through feeling. Macfarlane’s cathartic, embodied practice of transforming wool fibre into 3D sculptures, through laborious wet-felting techniques, acts as tactile and visual metaphors for intimacy and vulnerability, while Alcock draws on the faculties of fantasy and surrealism to contemplate the dynamics of power, helplessness and our place within it. Together their works embody the tension between softness and defence, intimacy and distance.

For this new body of work, both artists have incorporated clay, extending their practices into new, shared material ground. Clay, like wool or paint, records touch; it carries the imprint of care. This new dimension connects their individual languages through gesture and tactility.

Try a Little Tenderness also marks their first collaboration, blending painting, fibre and clay into hybrid works that embrace uncertainty, trust and mutual support. Their process offers a gentle refusal of hyper-individualism, proposing collaboration itself as a tender, radical act.

The artist’s bridge their methodologies and materialities by blurring the boundaries of humans and nature while tending to the significance of the senses. Coming together to co-create this safe space full of feeling and obscure delight, the exhibition will invite viewers to consider what it means to belong, to protect and to consider how care can be our deepest strength in an uncertain world.

Association for Visual Arts .