Belongings: a collaborative hand-embroidery art installation by artist Susan Aldworth

Belongings started life in 2024 when the political rhetoric about migration degenerated into dehumanising language. Artist Susan Aldworth is a third generation Italian, and wanted to make an artwork which challenged these negative narratives about migrants and sanctuary seekers. She decided to tell one story of migration in the hope it would resonate with many.  In 1924, her grandmother - Luigia Berni - left the small town of Bardi, in Northern Italy, for a new life in London. She was 23 years old, newly married and carrying a small baby. She was travelling alone. In her small suitcase, alongside basics for her and the baby, was her grandmother’s linen nightdress which got passed down to each generation.  Aldworth imagined the contents of this suitcase, and created Belongings, an installation of thirty-five individual antique clothes, including the nightdress that was in the original suitcase, hand-embroidered with family photographs, stories and recipes. Suspended in mid-air, they highlight the transitory and emotional nature of an uprooted life.

Belongings was a collaborative project. Aldworth hand-stitched her grandmother’s nightdress and collaborated with 25 BA students from the Royal School of Needlework and 9 community stitchers from Sleaford Embroiderers. Many of the embroiderers themselves had their own family stories of migration.  Aldworth provided each embroiderer with an item of clothing, the embroidery threads, the text they had to sew on it and historic family photographs printed on fabric. After initial discussions about the aim of the installation and the selected colour choices,  each embroiderer had artistic freedom to stitch the story and position the photograph in an imaginative way onto the fabric. The resulting embroidery was brilliant and surprising – the clothes embody the story. Each one is a poignant and beautiful work of art. In Belongings Aldworth tells one person’s story through the intense craft of hand embroidery in the hope it resonates with many. Can art be a tool for change? Her intention was to tell one person’s story through the slow art of hand-embroidery (historically a largely female art form) in the hope it will resonate with many. The installation has been shown three times in the UK – Edinburgh Printmakers in 2026, The Arcade, Kings College London in 2024 and the National Centre for Craft and Design, Sleaford, Lincolnshire in 2023. Aldworth hopes to tour Belongings further in the future.

Today, global migration and forced displacement are at a record high. In the UK, despite a rich history of positive migration impacts, hostile policies and increasing experiences of racism and discrimination have made it difficult for many of the people who migrate to feel that they belong.  Belongings provokes us to think about migration, the human stories and the richness it brings. So that one day, a young woman like Aldworth’s grandmother migrating to the UK for a better life might truly arrive in a place is where she feels that she belongs.