Paper, Scissors, Thread: Lives in Layers
Paper. Scissors. Thread. The title is also a method — but what does it mean to draw with a needle, or cut a portrait from a single sheet? At jaggedart gallery in Marylebone (until 5 June 2026), Batool Showghi and Charlotte Hodes answer that question from opposite ends of the workbench, and in doing so, find themselves making kindred work.
Batool Showghi, The Silent Speakers, 2026. Textile, stitching and acrylic paint on canvas.
Showghi's tools are the sewing machine and its needle, repurposed from decoration into mark-making, as a draughtsman wields a pencil: with intention. Her work is rooted in the experience of women navigating cultural and religious boundaries, and in the turbulence of immigration, family disintegration and displacement. These are not abstract concerns; they are autobiographical. Offcuts of Iranian scarves and Japanese kimonos are layered and stitched with linear black thread, conjuring female figures from what might otherwise be discarded cloth. Handwritten Farsi poetry surfaces between the seams, a poetic reflection on memory, on a family scattered, on a city lost to war.
Batool Showghi, The Untold Stories No 2, 2023. Textile, stitching and acrylic paint on canvas.
Her latest series responds to the uprising of Iranian women, weaving in family birth certificates, passports and documents to give form to figures who embrace, console, and prepare to resist. Beauty and sadness coexist in every piece; the struggle, as Showghi herself suggests, will always be there. Her work is held at Tate Britain and the British Library, and she has recently been shortlisted for the National Museum of Women in the Arts' Women to Watch.
Charlotte Hodes, The picnic #5, 2022. Papercut.
Where Showghi stitches, Hodes cuts. Working with a scalpel (she won the Jerwood Drawing Prize for drawing with one), her figures move across dishes, canvases, prints and paper with a touch of humour, lightness and freshness that belies the rigour behind them. Her imagery is drawn from deep archival research: the copper engravings of the Spode Museum Trust, the Wallace Collection, the Victoria Gallery in Liverpool. Motifs and patterns are printed, scanned, deconstructed, redrawn, cut and layered to build her distinctive graphic language.
Charlotte Hodes, Conversations en Plein Air, 2023. Hand-cut enamel transfer china tableware.
The result is a cast of silhouetted women who meander through landscapes and playfully defy historical conventions: they stand on teapots, use tea sieves as mirrors and microphones, and nonchalantly rest upon the surfaces of tea crockery. Her ceramic works also present women defined not by their beauty but by their tools: a beekeeper with her smoker, a GP with her stethoscope, an astronomer and her telescope. Also on show are works from Conversations en Plein Air, first exhibited at Geneva's Ariana Museum, in which figures stranded on ceramic islands reach towards one another across impossible distances: mobile phones, paper aeroplanes, megaphones held aloft. A meditation on the pandemic years that has not dated in the least.
Charlotte Hodes. Making Contact; flying dog, 2022. Papercut.
Together, the two artists form a conversation that is tender and tenacious in equal measure. Their materials differ; their preoccupations rhyme. Both understand that cloth and paper are never merely surfaces. They are skins, archives and, in the right hands, acts of witness.
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Further Information:
paper | scissors | thread is on show until 5 June 2026 at jaggedart, 28A Devonshire Street, London W1G 6PS.
Opening times: Tuesday–Friday, 11am–5pm; other times by appointment.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Batool Showghi, The Untold Stories No 3, 2023 (detail). Textile, stitching and acrylic paint on canvas.
All further images courtesy of the artists and jaggedart gallery, and as credited in photo captions.