Common Threads

Common Threads is a women’s collaborative embroidery project initiated by Alice Kettle, following her ‘Stitch a Tree’ project for the Karachi Biennial. The project brings together artisans from the Ra’ana Liaquat Craftsmen’s Colony (RLCC) in Pakistan with women from the South Asian diaspora in Britain, creating a shared body of work developed across borders and cultures.

Kettle began the project online during the pandemic, meeting regularly with the women at RLCC to embroider together and to explore ideas of home, belonging, and the relationship between people and the land they inhabit. Aware of the significant South Asian diaspora in East Lancashire, she introduced participants in the UK and Karachi online, enabling them to collaborate on a project that transcended geography and cultural difference.

The first phase of the project was with the British Textile Biennial in 2023. Participants from Community Arts by ZK in Pendle and the Bangladesh Welfare Association in Burnley shared personal stories of home with their counterparts in Karachi. Working with artist Rabia Sharif, these narratives were translated into stitched imagery. A third group, based in Bristol and working through the charity Bridges for Communities in partnership with Arnolfini, later joined the project. Together, the UK groups completed the panels, filling in the remaining sections to form a collective visual narrative.

Online meetings and a shared WhatsApp group continued to connect the women throughout the process, fostering a sense of community and using stitch as a unifying language of making. For this exhibition at Harewood House, the Shantona Women’s Group in Leeds again responded to the partially completed panels from RLCC and working with artists Rabia Begum Sharif and Elnaz Yazdani. The resulting works linked shared experiences of family and the meaning of home, wherever that may be. 

In 2024,two new Common Threads panels were commissioned by Harewood House as part of the third edition of Harewood Biennial, 'Create/Elevate', which celebrated the power of craft to surprise, inspire and bring people together to imagine new worlds. The works were exhibited at Harewood House from 1 June to 20 October 2024.