Blog – Dayanny So

Water, Memory, and Making Together

I am a multidisciplinary artist based in the UK. Although I have worked as a community artist over the last two years, my practice comes from a much longer personal journey. Everything I make is connected to my identity, my culture, the place where I was born, and the memories I carry from Cambodia. My experiences as a child, and later as a migrant living in the UK, continue to shape the way I understand place, belonging, memory, and survival. 

During my Memorial Gestures residency, which is hosted by Holocaust Centre North in collaboration with Community Arts Charitable Trust ‘6 Million +’. I am working as a community artist to explore how personal and collective histories can meet through creative practice. Alongside my research with the Centre, I am also collaborating with Immigration and Asylum Services Kirklees (IASK). I began by exploring survivor stories in the Holocaust Centre North Archive, visiting the IASK centre, and taking part in a workshop with an art facilitator and 6 Million +. These experiences have helped me think deeply about the different ways people carry memories of loss, movement, fear, hope, and rebuilding.

I have started to think of this project as a triangle. One point is my own lived experience as an artist from Cambodia, including my childhood memories of crossing rivers such as the Mekong. The second point is the personal papers of Holocaust survivors held at Holocaust Centre North. The third point is my work and conversations with migrant communities in Huddersfield and Dewsbury through IASK and 6 Million +. These experiences are not the same, and I do not want to suggest that they are. However, they create a meaningful space for shared reflection about what it means to leave one place, arrive somewhere new, and try to make a life. 

Two survivor stories from the Holocaust Centre North archive have particularly resonated with my thinking: Tom Kubie’s small Oxo tin, holding tiny, intricately made paper and wooden boats among the objects in his collection, makes me reflect deeply on how miniature objects carry immense emotional weight. The tin holds not just physical items, but the carried memory of survival, movement, and a life preserved across borders. I am equally drawn to the story of Liesel Carter. At just four years old, rendered stateless by Nazi persecution, she had to travel entirely alone across Europe – from Germany through Norway before crossing the sea to England. Separated from her family and mother, she held onto her doll and pram. That gesture of a displaced child, caring for and mothering her precious toy as a source of self-comfort is profoundly moving. Her journey also highlights water as both an imposing boundary and a vital corridor of connection towards safety.

My experience as a community artist is central to this project because I believe art can be a genuine way of listening and learning together. I previously completed a residency with a group of neurodivergent artists in the New Forest, working through shared experiences and collective making. That experience taught me to value the process of creating with people, rather than arriving with a fixed idea.

Walking around Huddersfield has also become an essential part of my research. The rivers, woodland, and industrial landscapes have encouraged me to think about the people who have lived and worked here across generations, including those who arrived after the Holocaust and found work in the textile industry, as well as migrants arriving today. While walking, I made rubbings from different surfaces, recording the textures of the place and thinking about the traces people leave behind.

A particularly important moment happened at the Barbara Hepworth Centre at the University of Huddersfield, where I saw a large staircase installation made from embroidered fabric. Its surface reminded me of tree bark: textured, layered, and marked by time. This gave me the inspiration to consider embroidery as part of my own project. 

During drop-in sessions at IASK, and while observing a workshop with 6 Million + in Dewsbury, I noticed how important food and drink were to bringing people together. Sharing tea, cake, and cooked food made me think again about water: how it is used in cooking, how it evaporates as steam, and how it is a substance none of us can live without. This every day, life-sustaining quality of water feels just as significant to me as its role as a boundary or connection. 

For a future workshop, I am considering bringing my own Cambodian kroma, a multi-functional piece of fabric with many uses. I would use it to demonstrate how the kroma is made, as a gesture to encourage participants to think about their own culture, memory, and the objects or fragments that make them think of home. I also want to introduce paper boat making. The paper and materials for this will be provided by me and by Holocaust Centre North. 

Participants will be warmly encouraged, but never pressured, to bring their own material or object if they wish, as I want to avoid anyone feeling obliged to share something connected to difficult memories or trauma. 

I am now imagining a collaborative textile work made through stitching, layering, and attaching materials to fabric, built from these workshops with people connected to the archive, IASK, and 6 Million +. Each contribution might express loss, happiness, memory, culture, or hope, so the fabric becomes a shared surface where different stories can exist together without being made identical. 

Water continues to return in my thinking as both boundary and connection: protecting and dividing through political borders, yet also linking people, cultures, and generations across distance. It also recalls crossing rivers as a child in Cambodia, a source of both uncertainty and passage forward. 

I am still developing the final form of this work, but I want it to grow from shared research and shared making, bringing together survivor stories, migrant experiences, my own memories, and the landscape of West Yorkshire, ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day where the work will be exhibited in January.