Sharon Brown - Stitched Histories

Textile Artist Sharon Brown presents new work at Queen Street Mill which reimagines found letters and documents connected to the history and workers of Lancashire cotton mills. Using freehand machine embroidery, Sharon celebrates and preserves fragments of the skills, structures and rhythms of generations of often forgotten lives spent working in the textile industry.

Every Thursday, Friday and Saturday of BTB21 Sharon will be on-site at Queen Street Mill working with her sewing machine to create a growing display of new textiles work. If you or your family have experience of working in cotton or cotton mills and have any paper documents, photographs or personal stories that you are willing to have photocopied then please bring them along with you to the exhibition.

Drawing with the sewing machine, creating layers of stitch that capture layers of history, these handwritten fragile papers reveal not only personal histories but also glimpses of global events and the social and cultural context in which they were written.

Further details of the ‘Stitched Histories’ community project can be found on Facebook at

Stitched Histories – Textiles Responding to Memories of Cotton Mills