Bedtime Tiles

Bedtime Tiles are a series of inlaid floor tiles made using traditional medieval encaustic techniques. Referencing the decorative language of 13th–15th century priory tiles, the work reimagines these historical artefacts through a contemporary, autobiographical lens. Each tile features iconography drawn from the artist’s personal life; everyday objects, emotionally charged motifs, and symbolic forms, collating a visual archive that merges the devotional with the domestic.

By employing historically accurate processes, the work establishes a tangible connection to the past, while simultaneously subverting its conventions. The tiles depict intimate narratives that speak to memory, identity, and emotional inheritance, playing with tone and texture to consider how the past imprints itself on the present, particularly in relation to trauma, memory, and sentimentality. The use of repetition and floor-based installation reflects the original function of priory tiles yet transforms them into sites of contemporary storytelling.

This engagement with history is both nostalgic and reflective, using material permanence to explore the instability of memory and the passage of time. The tiles address the lingering presence of trauma and the desire to soften it, offering a gentle yet striking visual language rooted in both personal experience and collective craft traditions. Through the integration of past and present, the work seeks to preserve what might otherwise remain unseen, reframing fragility as something resilient and quietly enduring.