Connecting Threads: tactile social history

Connecting Threads: tactile social history brings together twelve textile projects completed between 1981 and 2024. Each one acts as a social history document, providing tactile evidence of often untold stories of people on the margins, unexamined histories and overlooked places, all through stitch.

The resulting work is both personal and political. It ranges from tiny colorful hand embroidered fragments recording everyday life in South London and Yorkshire, to monumental, site-specific banners made with construction workers in the north of England.

As a collection it describes the author’s life in stitch and details how an artist-embroiderer works and thinks creatively, how projects are managed and take shape and some of the hurdles encountered in socially engaged practice. The projects described in this book encompass themes of identity and belonging, health and wellbeing, sustainability, community cohesion and social inequality, offering sensory testaments of life today.

In a career that has garnered international recognition, Setterington remains modest, committed to the next collaboration, the sharing of textile languages, the rituals of ordinary life. Hand stitch remains at the heart of all this. As she notes: ‘Embroidery today is celebrated, practised and appreciated by people from all different backgrounds and walks of life, and its value as a connecting thread and vital accessible global communication tool is finally being recognised.’