Art / sewing
Forging community connections through ‘collaborative stitching’
Run by the Brigstow Institute at the University of Bristol, Co-Stitch is a research project on the power of collaborative stitching.
In the autumn of 2024, the project featured at Bristol Photo Festival with Weaving Narratives, an exhibition at Royal Fort Gardens exploring “stitching as a form of storytelling”.
Co-Stitch brings together a multidisciplinary team of academics, artists and community groups, including the Stitching Together ‘sewing sanctuary’ hosted by local charity Bridges for Communities.
May from Stitching Together at the ‘Weaving Narratives’ Bristol Photo Festival exhibition
Offering weekly hand-sewing, dressmaking and embroidery classes, Stitching Together provides “welcoming spaces for asylum-seeking and refugee women in Bristol and South Gloucester to be creative and make beautiful and useful textile-based art, clothes, and homewares, while gaining confidence, improving spoken English and making friends”.
In the years since the classes have been held, the attendant women have been united by the power of creativity to forge new connections across different languages, experiences and cultures, by sharing, listening and learning from one another.
Display panels at the ‘Weaving Narratives’
Artist Jessa Fairbrother joined women from Ukraine and Hong Kong in a class in Yate, and went on to produce a short film about their work, called Poppies and Double Happiness.
“I’ve always believed there are invisible threads that stretch across the space between”, she reflects – “like a cat’s cradle passing between children’s hands in a playground. And those threads are always there. Because we are all connected.”
Women visiting the ‘Weaving Narratives’ exhibition
For information about Stitching Together classes, visit www.bridgesforcommunities.com or follow @stitchingtogether1.
Find out more about the Weaving Narratives exhibition at www.bristolphotofestival.org or follow @costitchproject.
All photos: Bridges for Communities
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