Contemporary Community Textile Artist Derbyshire UK
Collaboration Kindness Carbon Sensitivity
Common Threads Project
Story Cloth & Westminster Exhibition
Story Cloth, Textile Practice & Westminster Exhibition Curation
Period
2021–2022
My Role
Participating Artist and Exhibition Curator
Project Type
Collaborative Project
Location
Westminster, London
Project Overview
My relationship with Common Threads Project began through its story cloth practice and an experiential online circle, and later developed into work on a story cloth exhibition in Westminster. I joined a session hosted by Rachel A. Cohen, Tally Tripp and Lisa Raye Garlock and encountered a way of using slow stitch to hold difficult stories without forcing them into neat explanations. That experience became an important reference point for how I think about textile, listening and care.
Learning Through Story Cloth
The circle introduced me to story cloths as objects that can carry memory, pain, identity and hope. I was especially interested in the small hidden pockets sometimes sewn into the reverse to hold a message that the maker chooses to share. I later wrote about that learning in The Autopsy and Soul Of A Slow Stitched Textile Art Piece.
From Participant To Contributor
The relationship continued beyond that first circle. I was invited to create and film a stitched response in support of Common Threads Project and later helped curate a story cloth display connected to the international Preventing Sexual Violence In Conflict conference in London in November 2022. My role changed across those stages, from learner and contributing artist to supporter and curator, but the work always sat within a practice and methodology developed by Common Threads Project rather than belonging to me.
Survivor Centred Practice & Westminster
Common Threads Project works with survivors of sexual and gender based violence, and its digital story cloth catalogue shows the range and care of that survivor centred practice. The Westminster display took place in the wider context of the 2022 Preventing Sexual Violence In Conflict conference, which brought survivors, civil society, governments and international organisations together in London. The UK Government conference programme provides the public record for that event.
Boundaries, Care & Authorship
This project remains important to me because it sharpened the difference between supporting a process and claiming it. The story cloth methodology, survivor centred framework and therapeutic expertise belong to Common Threads Project. My contribution was to learn, make, support and later help curate within those values. That distinction is part of the ethics of collaborative practice for me: being useful does not require becoming the author of somebody else's story.
