From the series 'Afghan Faces', © Jenny Matthews

Sewing Conflict: Photography, War and Embroidery is a new solo exhibition by documentary photographer and filmmaker Jenny Matthews, whose work deals with issues of dispossession and human rights, with a particular emphasis on the lives of women and girls. She has worked all over the world for NGOs and on editorial assignments, covering momentous historical events including the guerrilla war and Independence of Eritrea, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the genocide in Rwanda.

Since 2020 Jenny Matthews has been making a series of photo quilts with edits of photos from her archive, with twenty-three of these hangings included in the exhibition here at Street Level Photoworks. Each photograph has been printed onto cotton linen, stitched together, and embellished with embroidery on material most often sourced from the countries in which the original images were made. Alongside these works the exhibition also features the series Facial De-recognition (2021), which is composed of thirty-five portraits of Afghan women with embroidery obliterating their features. This series was initiated to commemorate the Taliban retaking control of Afghanistan in August 2021 and to highlight the subsequent negative effect on the lives of Afghan women and girls, with a loss of their freedom, rights, and identity. The exhibition also contains work from the series Torn Apart on the current crisis in Sudan and a new sequence of images from Gaza. This exhibition at Street Level Photoworks brings together Matthews’ various works in these formats for the first time.

To find out more please go to the direct link.