Sharon Brown

Stiched Histories

Textile Artist Sharon Brown presented new work at Queen Street Mill which reimagined found letters and documents connected to the history and workers of Lancashire cotton mills.

Using freehand machine embroidery, Sharon celebrated and preserved fragments of the skills, structures and rhythms of generations of often forgotten lives spent working in the textile industry.

Drawing with the sewing machine, creating layers of stitch that capture layers of history, these handwritten fragile papers revealed not only personal histories but also glimpses of global events and the social and cultural context in which they were written.