Traces: Stories of Migration

Lucy Orta at The Nunnery Gallery

On my weekend exploration I came across a place called Bow Arts. I immediately loved it because the centre of operations is a building that resembles a black tin shed. I am slightly obsessed by buildings made of black tin, corrugated iron or wood. They could be home to an abattoir or a bare knuckle boxing ring and I’d still find something delightful to say about them.

Bow Arts is neither of these things. It is an organisation that works with artists and local communities and helps both to flourish in lots of different ways. While I was there they were setting up a festival to celebrate the history of the women and girls of the Bryant & May match factory, whose union in 1888, held the first successful strike in UK history to ensure better pay and working conditions for its workers. Later in the day I walked by the old factory, which is now luxury flats. Of course.

Across from my beloved black shed in what was once a convent, Bow Arts have a gallery space and cafe called the Nunnery. I tested the cafe, where I ate a very fine sandwich and an even more delicious almond croissant the size of a small family car. Sustained in body, I nourished my soul by going to see the current exhibition in the gallery. It’s free to get into and is on until 27th August.

Traces: Stories of Migration is a collaboration between acclaimed artist Lucy Orta and inhabitants of the East End, tracing first and second generation migration stories through their relationship to the East End’s historic rag trade.

In the first part of the exhibition, Orta has created textile portraits of the people who made the pieces in the second part of the exhibition. These next works are called ‘story cloths’ and were made by the participants in a series of workshops to reflect their own experience of coming to the UK and their work and lives here. The exhibition also features extracts from a poem by Nathalie Abi-Ezzi called Needle Around Her Neck.

Orta’s artistic practice is multi-disciplinary and she is most interested in collaborating with different groups of people to create works that speak about the relationship between a person and their environment. She has previously worked with prisoners, asylum seekers, care home residents and refugees looking at ways to give those on the margins a means of expressing themselves. As well as a practicing artist, she is also a professor at the London College of Fashion. This work, created over two years, seems tailor made for her skills and interests - if you’ll pardon the pun.

I enjoyed the textile portraits but it was the story cloths that I found most powerful and moving. From the Huguenot weavers of the Eighteenth Century to the booming rag trade of the Twentieth Century, the East End has long been associated with textiles. From providing refuge for political and religious groups and a means to exercise their skills, to the seedier side of forced labour and sweat shops. From slow, painstaking hand sewing to fast, disposable fashion, it’s all happened here.

Historically speaking, work like this would be labelled not as art but craft. Craft was the poor relation to painting and sculpture. Giant, costly oil paintings with their depictions of kings and battles was real art and real art was made by men. Craft was for women. Craft was domestic. It should know its place. Here, it gets its place, on the walls of a gallery, where it deserves to be.

It is one of the great joys of modern times that craft is, after so many years, being acknowledged and celebrated as art. From the stunning quilts of the Gees Bend women of Alabama, to the ceramics of Grayson Perry, crafts are levelling up and I’m here for it. Just as I am here for the equally wonderful and exciting idea that anyone who creates anything that helps them express something that may previously have been impossible to put into words can count themselves an artist.

The art on these walls intersects lives and histories, work and play, craft and art. It gives a voice to the voiceless. By displaying it in these spaces it not only speaks to us the viewers but also the makers. It tells them that they are worthy of taking up space and being seen and heard. It tells us that these lives are important, that these stories are worthy of our time and attention. It reminds us to look at the beauty in the every day things we so often overlook and the people we so often walk by. It seems fitting to me that this gallery space was once holy. For me, it still is.