Stitching Together – An exhibition with bridges for communities

Arnolfini and Bridges for Communities welcome audiences to Stitching Together, an exhibition of beautiful textile creations and stories of women from across the city, celebrating the joy of making through the shared language of sewing.

Stitching Together features pieces by members of Arnolfini’s regular Friday Women’s Craft Club and Bridges for Communities’ Stitching Together groups, including a collection of collaborative embroidered works reflecting on home and everyday life, family heirlooms and personal items rich with traditions and creative techniques passed down through generations.

In partnership with Bristol Refugee Festival and Bridges for Communities, Arnolfini’s Women’s Craft Club, is a weekly ‘craft and conversation’ group where women from all backgrounds are welcome to come along, have a cup of tea, share skills and get crafty.

The Stitching Together group provides a welcoming space for refugee and asylum-seeking women in Bristol to be creative and make beautiful and useful textile based art, clothes, and homewares, while gaining confidence and making friends.

Bridges for Communities is a Bristol-based charity which seeks to create communities that are kinder, fairer and more welcoming and which helps people of different cultures, races and faiths live well together.

Stitching Together - an exhibition is also an opportunity to celebrate and share the work Bridges for Communities does in Bristol and the unique partnership that has developed with Arnolfini over the last three years and the collaborative projects they do together.

Stitching Together will run alongside Threads, a major exhibition at Arnolfini featuring twenty-one contemporary international artists and makers, for whom textiles is their chosen medium, celebrating material and making, these artists use the storytelling power of textiles to connect with past traditions, find commonalities between cultures, time and place.

Threads and Stitching Together are accompanied by a programme which includes family workshops from Let’s Make Art, crafting activities and Celia Pym’s Mending Project, visible mending sessions, as part of Arnolfini’s Women’s Craft Club. See Arnolfini’s website for further details.

Stitching Together is on the second floor at Arnolfini and runs from 22 July to 29  July 2023. Entry is free, with donations always welcome.