Community Portrait Gallery

Portraiture holds a central place in the history of Western art. From the Renaissance onwards in particular, artists and patrons employed portraits to validate status, build historical legacies, and convey authority through symbolic objects, refined clothing, grand settings, and hierarchical proportions. Drawing on this tradition while subverting its historical significance and the power relations embedded within it, the textile portraits created by Lucy Orta form a ‘Community Portrait Gallery’. They respond to and engage with residents of East London as part of the project 'Traces: Stories of Migration'.

Between 2020 and 2023, a total of eighty-seven people from thirty-seven different migrant heritages joined a seven-week workshop programme led by Lucy. Developed in collaboration with the Portal Centre for Social Impact (London College of Fashion), the 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, where participants shared their migration stories and expressed themselves through textile-making, each creating a singular 'Story Cloth' artefact.

The forty-seven bold portraits by Lucy respond to this process. They depict the heads and shoulders of forty-seven participants who gave their consent to be represented. Their creation is collaborative: beginning with a photograph of each participant, the image is translated into a vector drawing and then into a pattern template. Participants contribute to decisions about the choice of fabric and the textile techniques used, including appliqué, which are assembled to reproduce each person’s facial expression and presence. The unique characteristics of each individual are rendered through layers of organza, machine embroidery tracing facial contours, and printed textiles, hand embroidery, and beadwork that evoke each person’s migration journey. Finaly all the parts are assembled and stitched onto colourful canvases, each 90 x 90 cm.

Each portrait reflects a singular personal trajectory and bears witness to both present lives and past stories. Layers of organza capture the presence of each individual, enriched by the inclusion of personal elements contributed by the participants. Rabbit pelts orbit Miglé’s portrait like constellations, symbolically linking her to the cosmic matter of her ancestors. In Hasna’s portrait, Lucy learned the Bangladeshi technique of sequin-making and attached dried fish scales to suggest the snowy roofs of London homes. JC is appliqued within a Prussian blue organza map of the world, hand-stitched with red French knots marking the locations of his migration journey across continents.

Together, the portraits celebrate stories of resilience, displacement, joy, and belonging that shape each person's journey. They reassert the value of personal and collective narratives within broader global conversations about migration, identity, and cultural memory.

• Author
• https://www.studio-orta.com/en/artwork/9...
• https://www.studio-orta.com/fr/new/238/t...
• https://www.arts.ac.uk/colleges/london-c...