jats:pThis essay focuses on the work of New York‐based artist and poet Candace Hill‐Montgomery. In 1979, Hill‐Montgomery described her work as changing ‘the containment we all live within’, pointing both to the social and political investments of her practice, and to her formal transition from making art in her studio to making installations in public, often from found materials and detritus. Her desire for recognition and understanding across difference at a moment of rising neo‐conservatism was an investment in social and subjective repair. I trace this impulse across ‘environmental sculptures’, collages and artist's books made between 1979 and 1983, articulating a general impetus to be against containment that, I argue, is also instructive as an art‐historical method.</jats:p>