The Artists

Alena Grom

Mavky

Alena Grom is a Ukrainian artist and documentary photographer working at the intersection of conceptual photography and reportage. She explores themes of war, memory, and human resilience, documenting life in frontline and occupied territories for over eight years. Her practice combines photography, video, and text to illuminate personal and collective experiences of survival and solidarity.

Mavky focuses on real women from the village of Horenka, Buchansky District, which was on the front line during the early months of the war in 2022. These women, members of the volunteer group Horenski Mavky, create camouflage nets and clothing under harsh conditions, providing essential protection for soldiers on the front.

Through their work, they embody courage, care, and community solidarity. The project connects Ukrainian folklore, especially the figure of the Mavka, with contemporary acts of selflessness and protection. Each portrait reflects female virtues: resilience, connection with nature, love, and unity, presenting the women not as victims but as protectors and builders of the future. The project references Andy Warhol’s Camouflage (1986), exploring the tension between the anonymity of camouflage and the individuality of the subjects. Camouflage becomes a symbol of both vulnerability and strength, highlighting these women as guardians whose power is rooted in nature, culture, and collective care.

GRENFELL MEMORIAL QUILT

The phrase Do Caged Birds Dream of Flying, featured on this section of the Grenfell Memorial Quilt draws inspiration from Maya Angelou’s Caged Bird, in which she writes of a bird who sings “with a fearful trill, of things unknown but longed for still,” and whose tune carries “on the distant hill,” for the caged bird sings of freedom.

Like so many others, artist Jane Thakoordin witnessed the horrific Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017, with people pleading for help from their windows, flames consuming the building floor by floor, and the nation left frozen in grief, unable to comprehend how such trauma could unfold in plain sight.

“I felt compelled to channel these emotions into one of the Grenfell Memorial Quilt panels after learning about Tuesday Greenidge and her team from the North Kensington community who created the Grenfell Memorial Quilt project, with a brave and bold ambition to create, by 2027, a quilt as long as the tower was tall -220 feet. A call-out on social media brought together 68 people from across the UK, each creating a bird to honour one of the 72 victims. As we reflected on the lives lost, we imagined them trying to escape a gilded cage – clad in deadly materials, constructed to appease the gaze of mansion and penthouse-dwelling neighbours.

Placing my trust in strangers to create and return their birds by the deadline became a transformative experience for both me and my artistic practice. The shared expression of grief, love, and sensitivity from this newly formed community, working collectively, yet initially alone became a powerful testament to humanity and solidarity. None of the artists knew the person they were creating for, yet many spoke of feeling a deep connection through the act of making.”

“With eternal thanks to the artists & supporters who contributed their birds and their skills to bring the quilt together, to form one section of the Grenfell Memorial Quilt:

Tuesday Greenidge and the Grenfell Memorial Quilt team, Next of Kin, Margaret Murray, Hannah Hill, Gemma Carr, Rebecca Smith, Emma Shankland, Maya Chavda, India Rafiq, Sarah Tomlinson, Giuseppina Santoro, Yolanda Shields, Jacqueline Maloney, Alison Gunn, Eleanor Hoad, Natascha Rohde, Ruth Carless, Paara Sabbas, Rose Borman, Alison Blackburn, Luke Rooney, Helen Waite and the Proudly Upcycled Group, Xander, Crappy Craft Club, Al Thomas, Safa, Dibby,  Bronwyn Opland, Clare Woodcock, Eve Jollands, Tina Francis, the Incredible Surplus team, Ronnie, Bihana, Maria, Noor, Arts All Over the Place, Marcie Porteous, Kirstie Lewis, Carli Jefferson, Emma Bloor, Helen Jones, Jude Cooper, Rohanie Campbell-Thakoordin, Ann Smith, Mumina Nessa, Zarina Hayes, Aysha Nessa, Lynne Harrison, Rachel Duncan, Sara Dyer, Elisa Renouf, Sangeeta Chauhan, Grace Charles, Fharat Rehman, Jan Purret, Faith Pope, Francesca Wright, Sarah Wilson, Simone Brown, Mary Shirley, Maria Magdelena Walcek.

Lastly, and most importantly, we say a heartfelt thank you to the memory of all 72 beautiful humans, who lost their lives due to corporate greed and incompetence. We offer our respect to the bereaved families, and vow never to forget. No justice, no peace.”

HENRY / BRAGG

JACQUI MCASSEY

Lionesses Touchline Coat

Jacqui McAssey is a Senior Lecturer in Fashion at Liverpool School of Art and the founder of GIRLFANS and Get Your Kits Out Festival. Her research, writing and curatorial projects connect fashion, football fandom and gender equality, with a sustained commitment to increasing the visibility and agency of women and non‑binary fans within football culture.

Since 2013, Jacqui and co‑lead Zoe Hitchen have developed GIRLFANS into a significant platform for celebrating and documenting the often overlooked presence of female and non-binary football supporters. Combining contemporary photographic approaches with the DIY spirit of fanzine-making, the project challenges entrenched assumptions about who belongs in football.

McAssey’s wider creative work continues to shape conversations around representation in the game, offering alternative narratives that emphasise women’s contributions to the culture, style and social history of football.

The Lionesses Touchline Coat draws on the cultural energy of football terraces, particularly chants, songs and clothing that hold collective meaning by reclaiming and feminising them to centre female supporters’ experiences, when their own stories were overlooked. The garment, a nod to Arsene’s Wenger’s Arsenal puffer coat, was commissioned for the England Women’s Squad Announcement film ahead of the UEFA Women’s EURO 2022, a tournament the England team memorably went on to win.

It is constructed from layers of used England scarves sourced from Classic Football Shirts. Integrated into this is a bespoke scarf with feminised lyrics from the 1998 England song, Vindaloo by Fat Les, “Me and me Mum and me Aunt and me Gran”, designed by Jacqui and produced by Wildemasche.

The Lionesses Touchline Coat has travelled to both the UEFA Women’s EURO in England and the FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia in 2023. As part of its journey, fans have worn or tried on the coat around stadiums and at Free Lionesses fan meet-ups hosted by the Football Supporters’ Association. This transformed the coat into a participatory object of pride, solidarity and visibility within the rapidly expanding landscape of women’s football fandom. These encounters were photographed for GIRLFANS England fanzine, which was published in 2026.

This work marks the first garment in a developing series of ‘Femorabilia’ by Jacqui, establishing new creative and scholarly approaches to documenting, celebrating and critically examining women’s contributions to football culture.

Concept: Jacqui McAssey

Design and Construction: Jacqui McAssey and Paul Robinson

JOHANNA MARK

Johanna Mark AKA Medulla Textiles is a textile artist, sewing magical creations from her tiny studio located at the lake of constance, Austria.

“I studied Arts & Communication and Fashion & Styles at the academy of fine arts in Vienna to become an art teacher, but the sewing-passion is something I got from my Mama. I grew up beneath a sewing machine and my biggest passion is and was always creating fantasy friends and crazy, glittery artsy stuff.”

KATHERINE JAMES

Katherine James is a Leeds-based artist. She is best known for her unique re-imaginings of armour, made by crafting chainmail into many different forms and materials to alter its symbolic values. Her pieces are often highly time-consuming to create and can take weeks and in some cases months to complete. Her expression is not bound by scale and can take the form of body adornments and large-scale sculpture.

Traditional wedding ceremonies often dictate separate actions for a bride and groom to undertake, with the veil playing a prominent role in this process. Through the chain veil, Katherine imagines how this item of adornment could be creatively altered to reflect societies’ changing attitudes towards traditional roles within partnerships, as well as gender identity. Katherine has created this veil from her signature chainmail-lace, the typically masculine symbol of armour has been crafted into feminine lace-like patterns. The piece unifies the opposing characteristics of each material, reflecting the nuance and complexity of our identities, as well as symbolising a commitment to a relationship free from gender-specific expectations.

Upon graduating from the University of Leeds School of Design in 2020, Katherine was awarded the Berkofsky Art Prize. She has since exhibited sculptures in group shows at the Crafts Council Gallery, Leeds Art Gallery, Sunny Bank Mills, twice at London Craft Week and the RA summer open among other notable shows. Most recently she showed in the Open at Collect, the leading international art fair for contemporary craft and design.

Katherine is currently undertaking an Arts Council England funded “developing your creative practice” project creating sculptures which combine silver and charcoal.

KATE TUME

Kate Tume is an artist living and working in Worthing, West Sussex. She is self-taught and works in a variety of hand-techniques including embroidery, embellishment, stumpwork and goldwork. Her work seeks to interrogate themes of grief, transformation and divinity.

Becoming widowed in mid-2021 catalysed a profound shift in her work. Despite always exploring ideas of memorial, the work now comes from a deeply personal place of processing her own grief, and aspires to create liminal places for the wearer/viewer to inhabit and feel their own responses, whatever they are.

Kate had been making art about memorialising non-human losses for many years. Following the terminal diagnosis and subsequent death of her beloved husband Nicky in 2021, Kate was compelled to completely rearrange her art practice, mirroring the total rearrangement of her life. The idea of death masks, albeit for extinct species, had come to her several years earlier, but it was for this new deeply personal purpose that they have been successfully realised.

The series of 8 wearable sculptures featured in For the Love of Textiles create a pantheon of deities, each representing a facet of profound love lost, each a deity of grief. Fascinated by the notion of Magical Objects, these are not just sculptures to be observed, but ritual objects to be worn, as humans have always done through millennia for such rites of passage. She sees these as tools for transformation; a room into which the wearer can go to become changed.

Not only concealing, but releasing, communing, becoming other, experiencing the otherness and othering of grief, and creating a sacred ritual object.

For Kate, they are also portraits – self – and of her husband.

Created using her own method, a hybrid of metal mesh and wire using stumpwork techniques, each mask is intended for wear and robustly made in cotton drill and felt before being heavily embellished, each bead and sequin individually sewn by hand. Using saturated colour and materials dripping with texture, Kate is a maximalist rejecting traditional western aesthetics of mourning. As one review observed, “not only does this work suggest making the unsaid and unshown visible, but making it ultra-visible”

“This work is dedicated to Nicky Tume and our eternal love.”

Photographs featured in the exhibition by Sam Winter.

Sam is a disabled and queer artist splitting their time between Sussex and South Wales. After receiving a formal arts education in film photography and visual arts at Thames Valley University and Brighton University, Sam returned to their art practice in 2025, a decade after first becoming disabled.

MANYA GOLDMAN

Manya Goldman was born in Cape Town, South Africa. She came to London in the 1960’s with her family, who were political refugees from Apartheid.

Manya has worked in several media including basketry, painting and printmaking, before arriving at her present practice working with hand embroidery.

Manya’s work deals with family and relationships. She explores the territory of memory and questions concerning belonging and loss. In choosing to work in hand embroidery, she welcomes the slow unfolding of meaning. She uses fine silk and cotton thread which she combines as if mixing paint and with this palette she works to reconstruct, or reimagine, the sense of a moment.

Her recent pieces deal with capturing the immaterial; ghosts fleeting through the mind, caught in a web of stitching. Family photographs are her starting point for exploration and recreation. The works behave as emotional sutures: to repair lost people and places; to bring them back to life.

Manya wants to take the viewer into their own memories, and through her personal history of displacement, produce a resonance with theirs.

Her recent work has been selected for the Royal Academy Summer Show in 2022 and 2023. She was a featured artist with the Candida Stevens Gallery at Collect in 2025. She won First Prize for Hand Embroidery in the Mr X Stitch Competition in 2023.

NICOLE CHUI

Nicole Chui is a London-based embroidery artist whose “messy, brash, and disruptive” style subverts the traditional medium to explore identity, intuition, and emotion. By visualizing inner narratives through expressive stitching, Nicoles practice focuses on the intersection of movement, sports, and community.

Her work is deeply informed by her background in dance and football; she is the co-founder of Baes FC, a grassroots collective for women, trans, and non-binary people of Asian heritage. A graduate of London College of Fashion, Nicole was named one of the Evening Standard’s “25 Future Faces” in 2019. In 2025, she completed a residency at Tottenham Hotspur’s OOF Gallery, debuting her solo exhibition, Ruined.

The practice of Nicole Chui centres on hand embroidery as a form of emotional disruption. By repeatedly stitching layers in an intentionally imperfect manner, Nicole rejects the traditional pursuit of textile “neatness” in favour of raw, visceral expression. Her work serves as a physical record of intuition, visualizing the messy complexities of identity and the inner narratives that exist beneath the surface.

Nicole’s technical approach often moves beyond the hoop to challenge the boundaries of the medium. In her piece Tethered, she collaborated with a local maker to develop a custom frame that allowed for a more expansive, structural approach to layered stitching.

This interest in unconventional surfaces is further explored in She’s A Keeper—a centrepiece of her OOF Gallery residency—where she hand-stitched directly into a football. Developed in collaboration with TOMME Studio, the work reimagines the ball as a bag, blending domestic craft with the ruggedness of sport.

These techniques trace back to Nicole’s initial return to football in 2019, when she began hand-embroidering directly onto her goalkeeper gloves. This act of blending her athletic and artistic worlds remains the foundation of her practice: a brash, tactile subversion of sport and tradition through the resistance of the needle.

Nicole has worked with high-profile clients including Nike, adidas, Manchester United, TINIE, Victoria Beckham, i-D, and the Young V&A, positioning her as a leading contemporary voice in textile art.

SARAH-JOY FORD

The White Rabbits

Dr Sarah-Joy Ford is an artist and independent scholar working through quilting to explore the complexities and pleasures of lesbian and queer communities, histories and archives. Sarah is one half of intergenerational lesbian artist duo Ford and Field, who hold a Visiting Research Fellowship at FAHACs, The University of Leeds (2025-2028).

“The portraits featured in For the Love of Textiles depict the two rabbits that inspired my recent exhibition Rabbit in Bury Art Museum, my white rabbits: John and Peter.

The first white rabbit arrived shortly after I was born in 1993. A Christmas present from Great Aunt Beatie and Great Aunty Nellie. They were not really white at all, but be-suited in creamy onesies, dotted with pale pink and yellow flowers – little green leaves jovially dancing. At their necks a pristine white bow, which mostly became, and stayed untied as two dancing ribbons. Their miffy mouths marked as an X in neat little grey stitches nestled. Their black eyes shone in hard, flat, glassy disks.

I was a sickly child forever throwing up; onto myself, my belongings and those around me. The White Rabbit was often victim to these unfortunate emissions. My parents hatched a plan and made the trip to Mothercare to acquire the second White Rabbit. A twin. For several years I believed there only to be one White Rabbit, The White Rabbit. But one sickly night I discovered the rouse and realised that my White Rabbit had a twin. Shadow rabbits sharing lives – waiting and working in shifts. Once I knew, I refused for them to be parted. The white rabbits have followed me everywhere ever since. My constant companions, my comfort and joy – my instant route home. These works are a love letter to them, to intimacies beyond the human.”

John and Peter in the care of Angela Maddock

“The objects in the vitrine in For the Love of Textiles represent a conversational, collaborative encounter between myself and the artist Angela Maddock, who is renowned for her work around, stitching, care and wellbeing. Peter and John have long been falling apart. These endless travels and washing machine tumbles took a toll on The White Rabbits. As I grew, the rabbits shrunk. The soft pastel patterns of flowers faded; the white of their fur turning grey. Like little old men their stuffing tired, curling in on itself inside themselves. Dropping down, creating hollow bellies and sagging thighs. New seams began to open where there were none before. The tips of their ears wearing down like sandcastles in the wind.

It was my mother who taught me to sew. She stitched the white rabbits too, constant small acts of repair until…they were in danger of completely unravelling. She sewed them new suits, tucking the seams in with the tip of her needle around grubby paws. She pulled the ribbons out of their new neckline and stitched new labels at their backs. An act of conservation care, and devotional love. But I continued to cling to the white rabbits, dragging them round the world with me.

They needed further acts of reparative stitching, and crafted care. So, I contacted Angela, whose work I had long admired, and I asked her if she would help me put John and Peter back together. We met for the exchange at the Whitworth, on a bench inside the Material Power: Palestinian Embroidery exhibition. We talked about the power of stitching, the potentialities of repair and the desperate need for acts of care in a broken world.

In the vitrine, you can see the results of her crafting with care, the water collected from their conservation grade baths, the stuffing she gently removed from their compressed and distorted bodies, and of course John and Peter themselves resplendent in their new suits, created with my very first cot quilt, and their new stuffing (carded) from the interior of the quilt. Thank you Angela for your loving attention, and meticulous care.

Angela Maddock is a thread-based artist and academic who works with and through the literal and metaphoric language of textile practice.

“I’m currently developing a new body of practice around softness. My most recent work is a large scale tapestry Cloth Body. I work in Swansea, where I live, and also in London. I make, teach, mentor and write. I use textile methodologies in healthcare teaching and arts in health projects.

I worked for many years at Swansea College of Art, where I was a senior lecturer in Contextual Studies and taught undergraduate and postgraduate students. I also managed the MA Contemporary Dialogues: Textiles programme. I am now honorary research fellow at Swansea College of Art.

My main interest is how making and transforming materials affects us in terms of our well-being and our productivity, in all aspects of our lives. I am a trained and qualified counsellor and have worked in the third sector and the NHS. Although no longer counselling, my interest in what we mean to each other and what objects mean to us persists in my practice and is explored in my PhD research. I like to describe myself as being bothered by cloth, which means that I am very invested in what cloth means to me, what it feels like next to my skin, how it is made and unmade and how it is central to our lives, whether or not we are even aware of this.”

ZOE BOSWELL

20 Polaroids & 1942-2024

Zoe Boswell is a Leeds based artist working with contemporary embroidery as a fine art form. Her work aims to transform the mundane into works of art, employing vintage photographs, postcards, and everyday items. Zoe’s work directly disrupts the reality her alternative canvases present and creates a new image, not through the use of a pen or paintbrush, but by piercing through the material with needle and thread.

By altering the materiality of the items, Zoe creates interesting challenges and a unique experience, both for herself and for the viewer. The works utilise the traditional practice of hand embroidery, whilst subverting the archaic stereotypes attached. Through her laborious and intentional work, Zoe challenges the notion of crafts being separate from fine art, and embraces embroidery as a dynamic art medium.

20 Polaroids investigates the concept of love as a verb through the exploration of connection. In this work, Zoe utilises hand embroidery to stitch directly onto vintage polaroid photographs and canvas. The piece explores the different bonds of humankind, from romantic love, familial love, the love of an animal, a group of friends or coworkers…

The piece uses thread to depict one line connecting not just the people in each photograph, but linking all of the photographs to one another. The continuous chain stitch illustrates the invisible ties between friends and family, to the complete strangers featured in the other images.

The work invites the viewer to contemplate their own connections.

“You are currently within this exhibition space, perhaps alone, perhaps with your partner, friend or relative, but you are also connected to the other visitors in this room who have chosen to visit this space today, with some element of a shared interest. You are connected to the artist, choosing to read about their work and intentions.”

20 Polaroids investigates textiles’ connotations as a means to mend. By choosing hand embroidery, the artist embraces human error and the imperfections this may provoke. We are not machines, and our relationships need creating, mending and maintaining. 20 Polaroids is displayed in a way which allows a viewer to see the whole of the piece, the front and the back. Zoe views the back of her works as their own compositions; they display the unintended, the messy yet beautiful and interesting aspects of textile art, mirroring the messy and imperfect nature of love and the human experience.

1942-2024 is a personal piece of work for Zoe. After losing her grandad in late 2024, Zoe found herself starting 2025 by working through grief. Their relationship was one of laughter, filled with love and happiness.

It was serendipitous that Zoe’s practice has for many years incorporated vintage photographs and postcards. Whilst looking through memories with her grandad, she found birthday and Christmas cards that she had saved from him, spanning the past 10-15 years. The cards were always kept, as mementos  of the jokes and humour they shared in their relationship.

Upon reading through these, Zoe found a common occurrence of little faces her grandad had drawn in the cards, down to the final one he ever drew for her in 2024 after his diagnosis, in the O of her name. It felt fitting that a relationship she looked back on so fondly had left a permanent record of smiling faces (and the occasional jokey sad one too).

Bringing together these aspects, Zoe utilised her art practice and hand embroidered her grandad’s small face drawings onto an image of him smiling, the way he always made others smile. It’s an intriguing process to meticulously copy each pen stroke, each inconsequential quick flick of the pen, to achieve the perfect imperfections. The piece is a testament to love and loss. Zoe physically stitched through her grief, creating personal memorials of her grandad.