Presented as a performative lecture and film, this exhibition looked at the stories of three women involved in London's textile industry over a period of six hundred years. Site-specific to the locale of the gallery, the characters were all at some point residents of what is now the Borough of Tower Hamlets, in the east of London - Medieval embroiderer, sex worker and trans woman Eleanor Rykener; notorious brothel owner and Civil War republican Elizabeth Creswell; and Sarah Wesker, a Jewish radical and garment trade unionist. Aside from their association with the textile industry, a further connection between the women's stories was that all three were at some point (albeit allegedly in Eleanor’s case) dramatized or caricatured, calling into question how historical fact is constructed.
Read about the exhibition in Artforum and Frieze.
Installation photography by Ollie Hammick.