- Artists
Making History is a collaborative project initiated by Meera Shakti Osborne, exploring notions of migration, displacement and self-love through storytelling, sewing and image making. The collection of tapestries, all made through community workshops held across London, weave together personal experiences, not as singular or objective, but as a shared condition.
The Making History project started as a collaborative tapestry making project, exploring storytelling through sewing and image making. It was inspired by a research project started in 2017, that focused on the forgotten and omitted histories of Meera’s family’s migration to the UK in the 1970s. Due to the pandemic, the workshops moved online and Meera developed the idea of a sound tapestry. Making History started exploring singular emotions chosen by the participants. The sound tapestries are a digitally-woven combination of speaking and original music by the producer A.G, made up of samples submitted by the participants.
The project is created with participants at Art4Space, Girls Project, Boundary Women’s Project and Stuart Hall Library in the autumn and winter of 2019, and by Peckham Youth Platform, The Gap Arts Project Digital Tapestries and 1525 Collective between 2020-21.
Biography
Meera Shakti Osborne is an artist and community organiser from London. Meera’s work focuses on collective healing through creative self-expression. Meera is interested in the use of art as a tool to create historical documents that represent feelings and the inbetween stuff that often gets left out of history making. They work in sound, oil paint, textile, breathing, talking and dancing. Meera has worked with Nottingham Contemporary, iniva, Newbridge Project, Royal College of Art, Peckham Platform, Focal Point Gallery, The Gap Arts Project, The Drawing Room and Reprezent FM. Meera graduated in Design at Central School of Speech and Drama in 2015 and Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Science in 2018.