ABSTRACT

Over the course of a year, participants living with acquired brain injury (ABI) at Brain Injury Matters collaborated on Woven Freedom, a large-scale installation that transformed discarded bicycle wheels into working looms. Spokes were removed from the rims and rethreaded to form the warp, turning each wheel into a circular weaving frame. Working by hand, participants wove vivid wool through these adapted looms, building a cumulative canopy of colour that was eventually installed in an external space at Brain Injury Matters as a sheltered, shared gathering place for the people who made it.

The work grew directly out of the organisation's Freedom Friday pedal power sessions, in which participants who experience difficulty walking use specially adapted bicycles for exercise. Those sessions gave the project both its title and its central metaphor: the wheel as a source of movement, independence and pleasure, reimagined here as a tool for making rather than travelling. By converting the wheels into looms, the installation holds two kinds of freedom, a freedom of the ride and a freedom of the making.

Made slowly and collectively across a full year, Woven Freedom is less a finished artwork than a record of sustained participation. Every wheel carries the hand of whoever wound it, and the canopy stands as a visible trace of a community's time spent together.

Photography Credit | Neil Harrison