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Responsible Features
Home: where the heart is. The place we were made, where every street, park and market stall has its own memory, and we know the way between them all like the back of our hand. Wherever you’ll find it on the map, home has certain truths which are universal. No matter how different the places we come from might be, there’s a sense of sameness and familiarity which we can all feel. Sometimes it calls us back, sometimes it keeps us at arm’s length. It’s complicated.
But it’s worth exploring. Birmingham-born artist Derrelle Elijah does just that, inviting us into his collage of home, created from family archives, community stories and otherwise forgotten imagery of Brum and its people. As he returns to where it all began and rediscovers an interconnected web of stories beneath the city’s surface, Derrelle stamps, prints and stitches his hometown narrative onto the timeless canvas of the Fred Perry Shirt. Scrapbook cut-outs and personal poetry coalesce across this reinterpretation of our signature style, positing the possibility of ephemera as art, and vice versa.
Like the sinuous black thread which Derrelle’s “Ode to Brum” is embroidered in across the Fred Perry Shirt, the collaboration draws links between distinctly different understandings of heritage and what it means to belong, whether to hometown communities or subcultural sets. Viewed as a whole, Derrelle’s work illuminates grey areas and hidden truths, encouraging us to take a second look at the people and places which have made each one of us who we are today. A celebration of the communities that create an individual.