<p>Soft Practices: Material Memory, Fragility and Speculative Futures is a 20-minute conference paper presented at the 9th Memory, Forgetting and Creating International Interdisciplinary Conference (InMind Support, Poland, 22–23 January 2026). The paper traces the development of the author’s practice-based research from The Lost Object (2021–24), which explored abjection, repair and material memory through fragile sculptural assemblage, toward a new research project, Vessels for an Uncertain Future. Drawing on feminist materialist and ecological thinking, including Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the research proposes 'soft practices' of carrying, tending and ritualised care as alternative methodologies for working with fragility and irreversible loss. Through textiles gathered from coastal environments and discarded industrial materials, the project examines how artistic practice can hold ecological grief while opening speculative possibilities for collective survival.</p>