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. 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.

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