Traces: Stories of Migration

The exhibition 'Traces: Stories of Migration' presents the outcomes of a community-led project led by Professor Lucy Orta, focusing on the lived experiences of people who have migrated to East London. Situated within the historical, cultural, and socio-political contexts of migration in East London, the project draws attention to the area’s longstanding relationship with the textile industry and the contributions of migrant communities.

Between 2020 and 2023, a total of eighty-seven people from thirty-seven different migrant heritages joined a seven-week workshop programme to share their migration stories and express themselves through textile-making. Developed in collaboration with the Portal Centre for Social Impact (London College of Fashion), workshops were held in local community centres—Poplar Works, Bromley by Bow Centre, Rosetta Arts and The Lab E20—in the London boroughs of Newham and Tower Hamlets.

Sessions included oral storytelling in group settings, providing a compassionate space for both joyful and traumatic migration experiences to be recounted. Participants were encouraged to imagine the shapes, colours, textures, and smells associated with their migration journeys. The shared experiences that emerged from these activities helped foster a sense of empathy and belonging, transcending emotional and cultural boundaries. Alongside storytelling, peer-to-peer textile crafting was explored, enabling participants to share textile heritages and skills, including embroidery, appliqué, photo transfer, and block printing. These tactile workshops resulted in the creation of personal ‘Story Cloths’—textile artefacts that represent individual migration stories.

Alongside the creation of the ‘Story Cloths’, the method of allied storytelling was employed by Lucy Orta to retell individual stories through her own responsive practice. Through this process, Lucy produced a large textile portrait of each person (90 × 90 × 4 cm), replicating techniques explored during the workshops to depict their likeness and migration experiences. These portraits were continually reworked with the input of the participants.

The exhibition 'Traces: Stories of Migration centres on migrant-situated knowledge and experience, through which two narratives are woven together: seventy-seven extraordinarily diverse ‘Story Cloths’ and forty-seven individual portraits forming Lucy’s 'Community Portrait Gallery'.

Working within the curatorial framework of organising public space, the exhibitions held in East London at the Nunnery Gallery and the UAL East Bank Wolfson Gallery were conceived as spaces for debate and encounters across multiple platforms. The ‘Story Cloths’ presented compelling examples of creative practice through the participants’ own voices, while Lucy’s 'Community Portrait Gallery' provided a mirror to the collective experience, where stories take on human form. Furthermore, by sharing the lived experiences of migrants—their struggles, resilience, and aspirations—the project makes visible the structural forces that shape displacement and marginalisation. In this way, textile crafting and storytelling function both as method and as a form of political resistance, confronting prejudice and cultivating understanding.

Alongside the exhibition at the Nunnery Gallery, a public programme was co-created and co-delivered with project participants. A book of poetry, 'Needle Around Her Neck' (2023), was written by author Natalie Abbi Ezzi based on participants’ testimonials; a documentary film by David Bickerstaff was presented; and the ;Traces: Stories of Migration' exhibition catalogue, with critical essays, provided further opportunities to explore the connections between storytelling, migration, identity, and textile-based practices.

• https://www.studio-orta.com/en/artwork/9...
• https://www.studio-orta.com/en/artwork/9...
• https://www.studio-orta.com/en/video/46/...
• https://www.arts.ac.uk/colleges/london-c...
• https://bowarts.org/event/lucy-orta-trac...
• https://poplarworks.co.uk/programmes/mak...