Diasporic Threads: Black Women, Fibre and Textiles, Sharbreon Plummer

This book presents a lucid and poignant survey of contemporary Black women’s textile practice, set within the wider socio-cultural weave of diaspora, labour and identity. The book gathers interviews with seven artists working across modalities—from hand-felting and rug-making to computational textile systems—and draws attention to how their work both engages and resists histories of anti-Blackness and misogynoir. The author-curator Sharbreon Plummer treats fibre and thread not merely as media, but as memory-carriers: warp and weft become archives of migration, lineage, community and craft. Aesthetic surface meets structural narrative; each page encourages the reader to slow-see, to attend to texture, stitch-gesture, subtle colour shifts—and to listen to the lived voices behind the cloth.

Designed and illustrated with a thoughtful precision (by Saffa Khan, and designed by Scarlett Ryan and Chris Shortt), this volume is both intimate and expansive. Its small size (72 pages, 200 × 140 mm) belies its ambition: to reposition fibre-making and textile art by Black women into the discourse of contemporary art, craft and material culture. The tone is reflective, rigorous but never distancing—led by the conviction that these makers’ work matters, not simply as aesthetic objects, but as interventions in history and culture.

About the Author
Sharbreon Plummer holds a PhD and works as a public scholar, independent curator and artist whose practice centres Black art history, textiles and material culture. ooted in her upbringing in Southern Louisiana, her research explores how ancestral memory, craft traditions, and diasporic experience shape contemporary art-making. Her curatorial credits include projects such as Of Salt and Spirit: Black Quilters in the American South, and Stitching Abolition (Chicago, 2022); she has also developed zine projects and served as writer for publications including Quiltfolk and Homecooked.

Publication date: 2022
Publisher:  Common Threads Press
Pages: 71
ISBN: 9781068625053