‘there is nothing convenient about my work’: lucy sparrow on sewing a supermarket

a convenience store is taking shape entirely in felt

Lucy Sparrow has spent more than a decade rebuilding the places where people shop and eat. Her materials stay intentionally simple, with a palette made up of just felt, thread, stuffing, and paint. Through them, she has recreated the corner shop, the bodega, the deli, the fast-food counter, and the supermarket, filling each one with thousands of handmade food objects that turn commercial packaging into something softer and much more personal.

In conversation with designboom, the British artist reflects on why these familiar retail spaces continue to draw her back, how her studio transforms mass-produced goods through slow collective labor, and what happens when disposable products are given individual seams and expressions.

That wider practice now leads into ‘The Beginning of Convenience’, opening at the Momentary in Bentonville on July 18th, 2026, where more than 20,000 felt works will reconstruct a late-20th-century supermarket across three galleries.

Lucy Sparrow, Sparrow Mart, 2018 | header image: Lucy Sparrow, Miami Art Week 2024 © designboom

lucy sparrow’s soft parallel universes

‘My art focuses on recreating those everyday community spaces that we all share,‘ the artist tells designboom. She wants visitors to recognize the logic of the place immediately, then become ‘completely lost in a felted parallel universe.‘

The scale of the Momentary gives that familiar idea more room than ever before. Shelves extend through the galleries, while fridges and freezers create a complete retail interior rather than a collection of isolated objects.

The supermarket as a spatial type has followed Sparrow through much of her career. Her 2014 installation The Cornershop transformed a former neighborhood store in London into a felt shop containing roughly 4,000 handmade goods. Three years later, she crossed the Atlantic with 8 ’Till Late, a New York bodega stocked with 9,000 pieces.

Sparrow Mart brought 31,000 felt groceries to Los Angeles in 2018, followed by a Rockefeller Center delicatessen and a fully sewn McDonald’s in Miami. In 2025, she returned to a distinctly English type of counter service with the Bourdon Street Chippy in London.

Bananas, Lucy Sparrow

convenience enters the home

For her upcoming exhibition, Lucy Sparrow has turned toward the period when processed and prepared foods moved decisively into household routines.

She describes the late 20th century as a point when more women entered paid work, dual-income households grew, and manufacturers developed foods that could move quickly from the freezer or box to the table. The exhibition approaches that social shift through the products it placed on supermarket shelves.

‘This is my favorite era for products and packaging,’ Sparrow says. ‘The bright colors and blocky typography are so visually arresting and really lend themselves to my process.’

She researched thousands of vintage packages before translating them into new, period-inspired designs. The work draws much of its visual energy from an era when product graphics needed to make a direct impression from across an aisle, using large lettering and characters that could be understood at a glance.

Hubba Bubba, Lucy Sparrow

making convenience the slow way

Inside Lucy Sparrow’s studio, those graphics return through a process with almost no convenience built into it. Each object passes through cutting and sewing before its identifying details are painted onto the felt.

A supermarket designed around standardized abundance becomes a field of individual works, with slight changes in stitching and expression giving each repeated carton or bottle its own presence.

‘In the studio we joke that there is absolutely nothing at all convenient in the handmade nature of my work,‘ she notes. ‘The irony of hand-making many thousands of convenience products is not lost on me. My process is the opposite of fast, but I really enjoy that paradox.‘

This contrast is the central theme of the show. Sparrow reconstructs products developed to save time through a method that consumes extraordinary amounts of it.

Dole Pineapple, Lucy Sparrow

nostalgia becomes a conversation

The appeal of Sparrow’s installations begins with recognition. Visitors scan shelves for a cereal they ate as children or a package that disappeared years ago. Others enter with no connection to the products and encounter the supermarket as a brightly colored period room.

Sparrow hopes that difference will prompt exchanges between generations, with one visitor explaining to another why a particular tape, snack, or frozen dinner holds such force.

‘I want to inspire complete joy and nostalgia when people walk into the installation,’ she continues. ‘Some visitors will recognize every product, while others won’t have seen any of them.‘

She frequently hears people begin telling stories once they encounter the work. The softness lowers some of the distance associated with an art exhibition, while the shop format prompts viewers to enter, browse and choose an object which speaks to them.

Spam, Lucy Sparrow

a shop that stays full

Earlier Sparrow installations changed throughout their run as visitors purchased works directly from the shelves. Inventory thinned, displays shifted, and the temporary store gradually sold itself away. At the Momentary, the felt products will remain in place for the exhibition’s full year.

Works will be available separately through the museum shop, including a convenience-inspired jewelry collection created with British design duo Tatty Devine.

The artist explains: ‘For the first time, the works in the installation will not be available to buy, and so the exhibition will look exactly the same in July 2027 as it does on the opening day in July 2026.‘

The decision changes the rhythm of the store. Its shelves become a fixed image of abundance, preserving the supermarket as Sparrow conceived it rather than allowing commerce to dismantle it piece by piece.

Plan B, Lucy Sparrow

crafting an archive of consumption

Lucy Sparrow’s work opens a conversation about which objects deserve the attention of the hand. Her subjects come from the lowest levels of the design hierarchy: disposable cartons and wrappers produced in enormous quantities, consumed, then thrown away.

She and her team devote weeks of studio time to visual forms that the original manufacturer expected to last only until the next grocery run.

The Beginning of Convenience preserves these products without treating them as precious originals. Sparrow remakes their typography and cartoon faces through a flexible material associated with school projects and domestic sewing, allowing the past to return slightly altered.

Her supermarket records a period of social change through the things people placed in their carts, while its construction restores visible labor to products created to make labor disappear.

Skittles, Lucy Sparrow

project info:

artist: Lucy Sparrow | @sewyoursoul

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