Workshop: Embroidery with exhibiting artist Katarzyna Perlak

This is an adult workshop, no experience necessary.

Work with exhibiting artist Katarzyna Perlak to learn embroidery stitches and make a handkerchief like one from the artist's Bated Breath series, an ongoing series that form a stitched archive, using political moments or a proverbs that have personal significance.

The handkerchief holds many symbolic meanings relating to both personal and communal codes. Often seen as a tool for containing bodily fluids and emotion, it has also been used through history as a method of communication, ritualistically in traditional folk dances, and as a code for sexual preference in the LGBTQ+ community.

Participants can bring a handkerchief that belongs to them or a handkerchief can be provided.

This workshop is for a small group and so confirmation of attendance will be required one week before the workshop.

Bated Breaths (2020–ongoing) is a series of embroidered handkerchiefs with twenty five completed works and new ones in making. Each work presents a different proverb, saying or a quote citing a family, friend, lover or a stranger. This series archives current and historical moments and is considering how the formation of these phrases reveal intersections of personal histories, collective memory and cultural etiquette.

Better a bare foot than none presents Katarzyna Perlak’s tender crafts series and explores how heritage and traditional handwork practices can be re-imagined from contemporary feminist, queer and migrant perspectives. Considering the contradictions within problematic social movements in Poland, as well as her own longing for home, Perlak utilises the feeling of nostalgia to imagine new possibilities for the future.

Katarzyna Perlak’s exhibitions include Liverpool Biennial (2025); V&A Museum, London (2024); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023); B3 Biennial of Moving Image, Frankfurt (2023); Brent Biennial, London (2022); Jerwood Arts, London (2021); Detroit Art Week (2019); BALTIC, Gateshead (2017); Diaspora Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale (2017)

For accessibility information please contact Learning + Public Engagement Curator Órla Goodwin.