Somewhere soft to land
The craft and art of social infrastructure
In the past few months I have published two blogs that reflect my attempt to unpick how destabilising everything feels and the sense of overwhelm so many are feeling — and that for me, at least, was beginning to reach a level where I risk being paralysed by the competing demands and saturating challenges. The first explored the feeling that the world is simply too much and how that might be less a personal failing than a symptom of the chaotic, destabilised world we’re living in. The second questioned whether this was less about navigating too much complexity and more about a deeper shift as the legitimacy of the current system loses its grip and everything feels exposed. In some sense, it doesn’t really matter which is true (both, neither, depends on individual capacities, circumstances, experiences), what matters more is how we navigate through it.
An inspiring conversation with the mind-blowing Jean Boulton a couple of weeks ago helped liberate my sense of inadequacy about navigating all this complexity well. She suggested that moving within an understanding of complexity was not about figuring it all out (impossible) but about stepping into a sense of purpose and acting in spaces where you have the power to do so (with care but not perfection, which is also impossible). Among a hundred insights, she also spoke about homeostasis — how our bodies, ecosystems, psyches have this way of finding balance in an open system — somehow finding order in chaos.
It made me think more coherently about something I’ve been contemplating a lot recently: that what we need now, as we face transition, collapse, metacrises (take your apocalyptic pick) is not more narration or more analysis but somewhere softer and slower to land. For me, this is not so much about individual nervous system regulation — which implies we can and should fix ourselves in isolation — and more about collective attunement. It’s about how we support our communities to metabolise and stay with disruption but without collapse.
I have long been interested in the interplay of psychology with the economic, societal and cultural. For several years now, at Onion Collective, we have framed our work around the attachments we have lost — linking it to the damage of late-stage capitalism and the need for economic (and planetary) renewal. Attachment theory tells us that as children, close and reliable ties to caregivers matter profoundly. Secure attachment does not prevent exploration or risk-taking but rather enables it. A child ventures outward because they trust there is somewhere and someone safe to return to. When they do not have this stable attachment, the response is often retreat from the world or anger towards it.
In this context, we talk about attachment as a way of understanding what atomised economic life does to people — it’s not about attachment as therapy but attachment as infrastructure. It reflects what happens when rootedness in place, stable bonds at work, entanglement with nature and community connections erode — how precarity, mobility and abstraction have frayed the relational bonds that allow us to feel secure. Of course, many of us, caught in the individualised trap, reach for personal therapeutic responses to this rupture, but the attachments themselves have also been collectively damaged and therefore must, at least in part, be collectively rebuilt.
Some difficult personal circumstances over the last year have also focused my attention on nervous system regulation. I’ve become increasingly aware of my own tendency to reach for an intellectual or analytical understanding of what has happened, in ways that simply keep me anxious and distracted rather than stepping into the more embodied work of feeling my emotions and letting them pass. Such experiences, while painful, also bring clarity about what regulation actually looks like. Faced with grief, wracked with heartbreak, shocked by trauma, people do not instinctively reach for solutions or fixes. We retreat. We find stability within our trusted friendships, the love of our children, in safe spaces, familiar rhythms. We reach for less, not more.
When this deep work is not done — when instead grief is locked away in a box, new flame sought out, or we throw ourselves into busyness or work — it may provide relief in the short term, but it rarely works over the longer timeframe. As every therapist (and every woman in her 40s) knows, the fallout comes eventually.
Of course, this is not a new revelation. Movements rooted in ‘rest as resistance’, trauma-informed practice, and generations of Black and Brown organisers have long understood this — treating collective rest as foundational. And yet, faced with the everything crisis of contemporary life, so many of us, especially in the community sector, instinctively reach for the fix. We try to solve things, push through, build more, organise faster, well before we have settled our collective nervous system. When faced by instability and systemic overload (felt not just in our minds but in our bodies) and witnessed in a kind of collective burnout, our instinct is acceleration. We default to what Black feminist writers and activists call ‘the white supremacy culture of urgency’ — the belief that we must always be doing (which in turn makes it actually harder to challenge the status quo and address root systemic issues). But in nervous system terms, the more effective move might not be from chaos to more activity, but from dysregulation and reactive urgency towards containment, retreat, slowing down and collective care.
The language of fight, flight, fawn and freeze is ubiquitous. But writers like Lana Jelenjev, alongside generations of community organisers, have suggested that more collective responses are possible too. She describes alternative nervous system practices: soften (making space to settle, recalibrate and loosen the grip of overwhelm); flock (finding strength, support and belonging through community); flow (responding attentively to what is emerging in the moment) and surrender (meeting uncertainty with trust, courage and openness). I’m not so interested in whether these categories are technically correct as much as the fact that they recognise that in moments of uncertainty, with Covid as a case in point, not everyone just defends or runs or withdraws. In fact, such responses are the mark of avoidance, not resolution. Instead, Psychologist Dr Shelley E Taylor talks instead about ‘tend and befriend’ as an extension of the traditional fight-or-flight narrative, highlighting that in communities, as in healthy relationships, we also respond to stress by caring more for others and fostering social attachments. We look for places and people that help us settle and move forward towards something that feels more about collective or relational support than personal withdrawal.
And in communal terms, places to do this matter. Social, cultural, civic infrastructure exist not just to fill gaps in services and tackle isolation but to provide spaces that allow people to settle and find connection together. Infrastructure then is not about community buildings, it’s about creating secure bases within communities — slowly and relationally, but intentionally.
As with therapy, the time, commitment and practice really matter. There is no quick fix or easy distraction that heals the chaos and anxiety of modern life. The dysregulation makes perfect sense as a personal and collective warning system. But when the societal scaffolding is failing, social infrastructure can maybe offer spaces where it can not just be propped up, but painstakingly and purposely rebuilt from the ground.
For us, at Onion Collective, practice-first traditions are an important guide. We are primarily social entrepreneurs not analysts or activists (though we do some of that too). The work for us is in the doing first and foremost (despite my attempts like this one to post-rationalise and create digestible meaning from that work). The knowledge and the regulation grow from taking action — from making, hosting, repairing, caring, failing, trying again. We bring people together to experience culture and to talk with one another about shared challenges, we host artists and makers, we create spaces for gathering, dancing and learning. We usually have no idea what will happen or who will meet whom or what might connect with what, but we get on with it anyway and see what emerges.What we know is inseparable from where we are, who we are with, and what we are willing to tend over time.
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And all this also helps our nervous systems. As I wrote in the blog post that started this series, it is not theory that steadies, but situated, grounded and relational practice. Making something with your hands, showing up to a shared space, repeating small acts of care are not symbolic gestures. They reintroduce rhythm, predictability, and trust at a community scale.
This is why at East Quay, we pay a lot of attention to hosting — to how the place feels, to welcoming everyone who comes along and to caring in the open. One of the most important things I have learned about having your own space is that it allows you to extend a different kind of invitation — to host the kind of atmosphere that is difficult to define but permeates a place, and, at least we hope, offers an instinctive sense of both openness and steadiness at the same time.
For us this means not rushing anything — and focusing on the relationships not the transactions. Funders want you to count every visitor that walks through the doors, as if that is a measure of success, but our measure is different. It’s not about arriving, it’s about whether people stay awhile, and whether they return. People might come four or five times for different reasons to East Quay before they ever make it into the galleries — popping in for a coffee, peeking through windows, attending an outdoor gig, visiting a studio holder — these are all moments of attunement to the place, ways of settling, figuring out if it’s safe and if they can trust it. It’s also why we invest a lot of time in working with schools, especially our closest ones — the generation of kids who are growing up in Watchet now, who know the team and visit almost every exhibition, feel totally comfortable in the galleries. East Quay is a familiar, trusted space for them; and consequently, within that grounding, their imaginations can fly.
This last bit is important. Safety is not the goal, just as it is not in attachment theory — and in any case, no guaranteed sense of safety is possible in such a dysregulated (and dangerous for so many) world. Instead, reliable presence and a return to some form of shared solidarity becomes the condition that makes exploration (and imagination) possible. As children, and as communities, you don’t explore instead of belonging; you explore because of it.
Surrounded as we are at East Quay by creative brilliance, I often explain this distinction by reference to craft. In the last couple of years, we have hosted some incredible craftspeople –Jeffrey, with his handmade vessels and tools, Bec weaving textiles from the wool of her own flock. For craftspeople, craft and making by hand is not about retreating nostalgically from the world but about remaining in it, but in a different way. The process of making slows down time. It requires patience, attention and attunement. It cannot be rushed. It is the repeated pattern of making that creates its beauty and the care and time taken is part of what defines it.
We also talk therefore about the ‘craft of community’ within cultural and social infrastructure. It takes the same kind of process of time and rhythm, relational care, and repeated interaction. It requires that we continue practising together and, in doing so, offers an alternative way of valuing and organising connection compared to the fast-paced and dysregulating norm of modern life.
Alongside craft, at East Quay, we understand art as doing a different but complementary kind of work. Craft is slower and steadier, whereas art is more about interrupting. Art doesn’t necessarily calm the nervous system — in fact, often quite intentionally, it does the opposite. This means art can be unsettling, provocative, disruptive — and this is not necessarily a failure. It can also be irritating and alienating, especially when not enough effort is put into the kinds of spaces we encounter art from within. But, paired with enough grounding to receive it, art does an important kind of work. It challenges, opens things up, introduces new and unexpected ideas. It forces us to ask questions of ourselves, makes us feel with intensity and see things differently. It can be painful and it can be full of joy. A bit like therapy, it creates moments of introspection that make new understanding possible.
I don’t, therefore, think of art as an alternative to craft but as a companion to it. Just like in attachment theory, we need both. Craft without art risks becoming conservative and cosy and repetitive. Art without craft can become destabilising and untethered. In a world that is too much, it is the relationship between them that matters. Taken together, art and craft allow us to stabilise in conditions of care and to question and re-imagine the stories we live inside. We need the containment of spaces softly held that settle the nervous system, alongside the imaginative and disruptive capacities that allow us to explore differently.
And so in our little corner of Somerset, perhaps this is what the social and cultural infrastructure we have built is moving towards. Infrastructure is not about fixing everything in an unsafe world. It is about expanding our capacity to face what is hard and to do so together. It’s not simply service provision, economic regeneration or cultural programming — though it may contain all of those things — but the slow rebuilding of our capacity to stay in relationship, respond, adapt and repair with one another through uncertainty.
This means places like East Quay, of which there are beautiful examples up and down the country, are not simply cultural venues or regeneration projects. They are ongoing attempts to rebuild attachment in practice. They are places where people can arrive carrying the weight of a world in chaos and sometimes leave a little more held, where trust is rebuilt through repeated acts of making, hosting, listening, and care. Where we are learning again and again, messily and imperfectly, how to rebuild enough safety for imaginations to reopen. So we can turn towards the change we need in our communities as we face into these difficult times, but not collapse beneath it.
In attachment theory, a secure base allows exploration. A child ventures outward because they trust there is somewhere to return to. We need to reach for the same in communities — though knowing we will never fully achieve it. What craft, culture, art and social infrastructure might be offering now is not just a useful metaphor for community-building, nor somewhere to escape from the chaos of a dysregulating world. It’s not a fix or a solution but a way of practicing that provides somewhere gentler to land. And then, from which, we can begin to re-imagine and learn how to live differently.
On the 9th November 2026, we will be hosting SPACE, a West Country gathering on Social Infrastructure and Shared Futures at East Quay in Watchet, Somerset. If you’re interested in coming along and would like to be informed when tickets are available, please sign up here.
https://mailchi.mp/eastquaywatchet.co.uk/space-upcoming-symposiums
My thanks to Katy Kent, in particular, for her careful reading and welcome testing of the ideas contained in this essay, as well as Dr Maria Gascon-Ramos for her trusted guidance in helping me regulate my own mind, and all the team at East Quay for their softness and disruption on a daily basis.
