honeybirchstudio
collective memory // imagined lives






















Honey Birch is an artist/designer of narrative experiences exploring the construction of identity through space, story, and collective memory.

By exploring archives, histories, and their own encounters as a queer adoptee, they examine the boundaries between lived and imagined lives. Their work is community and audience focused, spanning installation, moving image, and writing.






























Christmas Banister
Museum of the Home
2025
Public installation

Christmas Banister unifies the queer experience of kin with the marginal state of domestic thoroughfares. The work is an imagined alternative to a Christmas tree made up of balusters from stairways and corridors drawn by members of the  London queer community, spindles from the Museum of the Home’s archive, and Birch’s own drawings.






Bedfellows
The Roundhouse
2025

Immersive theatre

Queering our understanding of what a partnership can be, Bedfellows tests where the lines of parental, platonic, romantic, and sexual relationships blur, diverge, and intersect. It follows three relationships held between two bodies, asking the question ‘Who are we to each other?’.

Both a dualogue in form and in process, Bedfellows sought to apply design thinking to narrative, and literary approaches to set design through a collaborative approach in which writer and designer occupied both roles simultaneously.








Here, Somewhere
Dorich House Museum
2024

Exhibition
A curated display of research, installations, and series of participatory events exploring the speculative lavender marriage of Dora Gordine and Richard Hare, hinted at by former friends and acquaintances of the couple (albeit unwilling to go on the record).






If This Were Purgatory
2024

Docu-fiction

Capturing the conflicted identity of an imagined queer club queue through the use of overlayed audio and footage from five flagship clubs in London.
This 5 minute short poses as a liminal space where queerness is visible and vulnerable to the eyes of the general public.








Little Chairs, Little Conversations
2024
Documentary / Furniture
A set of street chairs and short film, designed in response to a finding trip back to China. Through mirroring a life that could have been by staging conversations with three other Chinese adoptees, this debut short offers a glimpse into the complicated feelings of loss, humour, and community, that emerge within the interracial adoptee community.






Rocks
2018

Ceramic
Ceremonial vessels cast from rocks found in Birch’s birth-village in Hunan and adoptive home in London.  








honeybirchstudio

@honeybirchstudio
honey.birch@gmail.com

Honey Birch (they/them) is an artist/designer of narrative experiences exploring the construction of identity through space, story, and collective memory. 

By exploring archives, histories, and their own encounters as a queer adoptee, they examine the boundaries between lived and imagined lives. Their work is community and audience focused, spanning across installation, moving image, and writing.

With a practice rooted in learning, they lecture across 3D Design and Story at Oxford Brookes and Kingston University.






Commendations

BFI Future Film 
Best Documentary
Nominee 
2025

Wiggin Emerging
Film-maker Award
2024

Fosters & Partners 
Highly Commended: 
Social & Critical Design 
2023 

Young Furniture Makers 
Short-list “Beech Box” 
2023

Roundhouse Poetry 
Slam Finalist 
2018

Poetry Society 
Cold Fire Award 
2017

Grants/Awards

Roundhouse 
Film Fund  
2024

Grand Plan Fund
2024

Diversity Matters 
Museum of London 
Grant
2023 





Solo Exhibitions

Here, SomewhereDorich House Museum
2024

Group Exhibitions

The Dyke Archive
Machina Kollektiv
Outhouse Gallery
2025

Freeyard Splinter Collective
Safehouse 1
2023

All On ShowLondon Design Festival
Hoxton Arches
2023

Film Festivals

Flare
BFI
2025

Future Film
BFI
2025

Queer East
ICA
2025

London Fringe!
Queer Film & Arts Fest

2024


Education

BA Product and Furniture Design 
Kingston School of Art
2023

Art Foundation Diploma 
Central Saint Martins
2019

Roundhouse Poetry 
Collective 
2019