When Flannery O’kafka learned that the shop-front space which houses Sierra Metro gallery used to be a carpet shop, something clicked with her ongoing ideas for a proposed Art Festival exhibition. The result is For Willy Love And Booker T: Blue Babies Do Whatever They Want. O’kafka’s show mixes photography and film installation as part of a deeply personal exploration about family albums, offering sanctuary and safety to adoptees like her in this most playful of spaces.

‘It began when a friend of mine sent me this film of her baby with a blanket on her head,’ O’kafka explains. ‘My friend sent me a message saying I’d love it, and how her baby had been doing this for 20 minutes. In the film, there’s a blue carpet; I’ve always wanted to carpet a space because there’s a different feeling when you walk into a space with a different surface. The carpet in my bedroom as a child was light blue. The baby in the film is wearing all blue. The ceiling in my studio is blue. Then discovering Sierra Metro used to be a carpet shop (and was light blue) all seemed to connect.’

O’kafka recorded herself singing what she calls ‘an improvised hymn’ which her partner had sung during moments when her autism and neurodivergency led to feelings of distress; this forms the film’s soundtrack. Other works in the exhibition (which O’kafka calls ‘a remix’ of previous work) include a series of riso prints featuring a photograph of a Palestinian mother holding a baby, with an angry sibling standing next to them. ‘There’s a soft defiance in the show,’ says O’kafka. ‘A space for the Motherfather to be elevated; not in hierarchy, but into a place that offers and accepts collective care and collective liberation. It’s all a reclamation of doing weird stuff because we want to.’

The show’s title stems from a meeting O’kafka had several years ago with her birth mother who, as a teenager in Ohio, had given O’kafka up for adoption. Willy Love is the name of her great grandfather, and Booker T her great uncle; these names became conflated with two other babies born to other mothers in the maternity home with O’kafka’s mother. Although those babies never survived, ‘they deserved to live and to have safe soft spaces and to party a little, too,’ says O’kafka. While a sense of intimacy prevails in O’kafka’s work, fun also exists throughout. ‘There’s a lying down space and a sitting space,’ she says. ‘And there’s a gift shop... ’

Flannery O’kafka: For Willy Love And Booker T – Blue Babies Do Whatever They Want, Sierra Metro, until 15 September.