An installation based on a conversation between friends is on display at Masterworks.

Kimberley Fisher is the driver behind Better Would, a body of work she created with Ish Yakub Corday, a writer and photographer, and Blair Raughley Masters, a photographer and ceramics artist.

A growing interest in creating spaces people move through, rather than presenting individual works in isolation, led Ms Fisher to transform the Rick Faries Gallery using suspended fabrics.

Around 25 pieces — including textiles and ceramics — form the installation. Visitors pass hanging lace, silk and cotton, encountering the works as they go.

Many of the materials are borrowed or found, including lace lent by Ms Fisher’s 95-year-old great aunt.

Better Would started with a request from Ms Corday: help with a project that was part of the master’s degree in photojournalism and documentary photography she was doing at the London College of Communication in England.

“She asked me to be her collaborator and we started coming up with ideas and visual language to complete her project,” Ms Fisher said.

Using written prompts, she created a series of cyanotype prints, a photographic process known for its deep blue tones.

“She would write a passage and then I would read that and see what came to mind and try to bring that into physical form by creatively directing photographs that she would take. Then I would collage them or embellish them in some way and cyanotype them,” Ms Fisher said.

As the collaboration developed, she approached Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art about a display of the project and invited Ms Masters to join the process.

“I've always loved how she frames work and the thought she puts into it,” Ms Fisher said.

The roles then switched: Ms Corday had been writing and Ms Fisher responding visually, now Ms Fisher began writing and Ms Masters took on the visual response.

Their longstanding friendships created a level of familiarity that allowed the three artists to create without rigid planning.

“When she asked me to come on board it was really exciting because I knew that I was going to be working next to a friend and also an artist that I really admire,” Ms Masters said.

“Even though we came out on the same page, we are quite different artists so it was really interesting working together. I won’t say for all of Kim’s practice, but in her cyanotype practice she really embraces unexpected results. I'm a bit more technical about my photography — I have an idea and I want it to look a certain way. So in that way it was a really great growing experience for me as an artist because I was able to learn to let go and embrace outcomes I hadn’t planned.”

That willingness to let go and trust the process sits at the heart of the exhibition’s themes.

As described by the trio: “The title Better Would speaks directly to this emotional terrain: the push and pull between wanting to connect with others and feeling bound by obligation to them; between moving through and moving on; the voice of the matriarch or elder who ‘knows better’, whose rituals of care are both sustaining and restrictive. The works on view inhabit this nuance, resisting easy resolution. Instead, they ask how care is learnt, inherited and carried and what it means to hold it all together.”

They started soon after Ms Corday submitted her master’s project last May. The way the work was made moved away from the idea of a single author, reflecting instead on a process that was shaped by multiple contributions, the artists said.

“Fisher, a visual artist, is working with Yakub Corday, a visual storyteller and writer, and Masters, a photographer, to explore the tensions between caring — for self, and others — and obligation,” their artist statement reads.

“Initiated either by written passage or photographic creative direction with her collaborators, Fisher generates cyanotype collages that respond to practices, to performances, to the ritual of care.”

Initially intended as a one-off project, it soon began to feel larger in scope.

“We thought it was just that collaboration but then we thought why not try to do something more,” Ms Fisher said.

For her, the move towards installation opened up new possibilities.

“I like the spatial experience, where people walk in and they're surrounded by things. It's more than the standard type project. It's how do the pieces sit within a context of laundry lines? The gallery has been transformed into this pathway where you're walking through laundry lines and sheets.”

According to Ms Masters, the use of laundry also carried personal meaning.

“I think for both of us the laundry is a symbol of you caring for yourself, for your others, for your family. The pieces are like memories of grandma doing laundry, hanging the laundry up on the line outside … it brings back that concept.”

That type of everyday work is what sits at the centre of Better Would.

“For me, it’s about the difference between care and obligation,” Ms Fisher said.

“To do an act of care with somebody really transforms the act from feeling like a chore to something social.”

• Better Would is on display in the Rick Faries Gallery at Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art until February 28. An artist talk will take place at the gallery on January 22 at 5.30pm. For more information or to register, visit masterworksbermuda.org/better-would/