In the quiet backstreets of London's Bethnal Green there is a corner shop with a difference. It stocks all the familiar grocery items you might need: from sanitary towels, to baked beans, to cans of Newcastle Brown Ale and McCain's oven chips. And, of course, it sells copies of the Guardian. The one deviation from the norm is that every single item has been hand stitched from felt.
The Cornershop, an installation by 28-year-old artist Lucy Sparrow, took seven months and around 300 sq meters of felt to create. Lucy and her assistant Rachel hand sewed all 4,000 items, which will be on display in the empty shop space until the end of the month.
"Felt is a fabric that is synonymous with primary school," says Sparrow, who has made the fabric her trade mark. "It often comes in very basic, bright colours and with a material like that you can approach subjects that might be more taboo and make them palatable and funny."
Sparrow describes corner shops as a "slice of life" and says that – apart from being fun – the exhibition encourages people to take a closer look at the everyday: "It's really made me realise what colours are used where. For example, blue isn't a very popular colour for sweets wrappers, but yellow is used loads. I've had to buy so much yellow felt."
All of her huggable goods are for sale, though unfortunately not at grocery prices, and can be ordered at the shop or on her website. "Obviously it would be nice to sell it all on opening night, but I have this fear of having to make it all again," she says. "I don't think I can go though that. It might actually break me."
As well as £1,000 of sponsorship money from Swizzels sweets, the project was funded by a Kickstarter campaign, which raised £10,500, and £8,000 of Arts Council funding, which only arrived two weeks ago. "Not including my labour, the whole project must have cost around the £14-15,000," she says.
Sparrow thinks that her Kickstarter campaign was so successful because it appealed to the inner child. "I think people thought, 'you know what, I want to see a corner shop made out of felt. I want to see that ridiculous idea'."
Sparrow names some of her influences as the Chapman brothers and Grayson Perry. She says she admires Perry's mixture of an appealing childlike style with highly-skilled craft. She fights hard against attempts to over analyse her work. "I made this and it didn't need to be made, but I did it anyway," she says.