Sewing Conflict: Photography, War and Embroidery
Since the 1980s, Jenny Matthews has been a prolific photographer of women. She has depicted women in protests, including at Greenham Common, and women caught up in conflict. Her camera has taken her worldwide to document wars, uprisings and genocides in Eritrea, Nicaragua and Rwanda. Since 2020, her work has taken a dramatic new direction: into textiles.
Image and image above: Jenny Matthews, Sowing Conflict, Street Level Photoworks 2024 © Tiu Makkonen. Image courtesy of Street Level Photoworks.
Matthews calls her latest works ‘photo quilts’. They piece together photographs from her archive, printed onto cotton linen, with textiles from her travels, from African wax print to Afghan floral shawls. To these elements, machine stitched together in zigzag, Matthew adds colourful hand embellishments in embroidery thread. At times the works resemble protest banners, especially when they are mounted on wooden poles in galleries, and when stitch is used to add slogans, such as the dying cry of George Floyd that launched the Black Lives Matter motto, ‘I Can’t Breathe’. At other times, the embroidered enhancements are more redolent of the decorative elements of genteel tablecloths, but only at first glance. For a photograph of a Guatemalan woman confronted by riot police, for example, Matthews adds a pink floral garland; the ring of roses throws a protective circle around her.
Image: Jenny Matthews, Sowing Conflict, Street Level Photoworks 2024 © Tiu Makkonen. Image courtesy of Street Level Photoworks.
In other portraits, Matthews stitches in the names of the photographic subjects she got to know in Ukraine or Sierra Leone; she embellishes their clothes to add colour and texture to their previously monochrome two dimensions. Chain stitch outlines the digits of a hard-working hand and seed stitches stand in for the tiny hairs on a forearm. Other textile gestures are more violent: trailing red threads issue from the bandage around the head of a howling infant in Gaza overlaid on a red and white Palestinian keffiyeh. The overall effect is moving on multiple levels, combining the realism and proximity offered by photography with the pointed, repeated insistence of needlework. Together the two techniques compel the viewer to look twice.
Text by Annebella Pollen
To see more of Jenny Matthews’ Photo Quilts:
jennymatthews.photoshelter.com
You can see a walk through her 2024 exhibition, Sewing Conflict, at Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow HERE.
Matthews calls her latest works ‘photo quilts’. They piece together photographs from her archive, printed onto cotton linen, with textiles from her travels, from African wax print to Afghan floral shawls. To these elements, machine stitched together in zigzag, Matthew adds colourful hand embellishments in embroidery thread. At times the works resemble protest banners, especially when they are mounted on wooden poles in galleries, and when stitch is used to add slogans, such as the dying cry of George Floyd that launched the Black Lives Matter motto, ‘I Can’t Breathe’. At other times, the embroidered enhancements are more redolent of the decorative elements of genteel tablecloths, but only at first glance. For a photograph of a Guatemalan woman confronted by riot police, for example, Matthews adds a pink floral garland; the ring of roses throws a protective circle around her.
In other portraits, Matthews stitches in the names of the photographic subjects she got to know in Ukraine or Sierra Leone; she embellishes their clothes to add colour and texture to their previously monochrome two dimensions. Chain stitch outlines the digits of a hard-working hand and seed stitches stand in for the tiny hairs on a forearm. Other textile gestures are more violent: trailing red threads issue from the bandage around the head of a howling infant in Gaza overlaid on a red and white Palestinian keffiyeh. The overall effect is moving on multiple levels, combining the realism and proximity offered by photography with the pointed, repeated insistence of needlework. Together the two techniques compel the viewer to look twice.
Text by Annebella Pollen
To see more of Jenny Matthews’ Photo Quilts:
jennymatthews.photoshelter.com
You can see a walk through her 2024 exhibition, Sewing Conflict, at Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow HERE.