Celebrating repair as resistance and why mending matters
Breaks & Joins partnered with St Margaret’s House in 2025 to create Many Hands: Make Mending Matter, an audio-visual exhibition capturing the people and stories behind the act of repair.
Over two Saturdays in January and April 2025, Sue Mayo and Chuck Blue Lowry documented the energy, care and collaboration in the wonderful Repair Cafes at SMH. Volunteers generously share their time and skills, fixing everything from toasters to trousers. Visitors come not just to have their belongings repaired, but to connect, to learn, and sometimes to hear that something couldn’t be mended after all. These exchanges were captured in audio recordings, photographs and original artworks. Some of those photographs are now in The Create Place, SMH’s workshop space, as a permanent exhibition of the hands that sew, a big part of what has been happening at SMH since the 1890s.
Have a listen to the audio piece created for the exhibition:
This exhibition was part of Second Hand September, and highlights repair as a powerful alternative to the wastefulness of throwaway culture. It reminds us that fixing things is not just practical, it’s political.
Many Hands celebrates not just the items that were fixed, but the conversations, shared knowledge, and moments of connection that make mending matter. Together, we use our hands to mend our things and build our community.
Breaks & Joins explores the repair of our stuff, ourselves and our communities. We engage in creative conversations through workshops, interventions, events and training to make physical and digital artworks which celebrate and interrogate repair as a radical act.