THE HELD SEA: Stitching Stories into Seaweed Workshop with Saoirse Amira Anis

Join us to tell your own seaweed stories with artist Saoirse Amira Anis! We’ll gather at Art Walk Project Space before heading down to Portobello beach to pick our own seaweed to sew with.

Historically, textile crafts like tapestry and embroidery are deeply intertwined with social movements, solidarity, community care, storytelling, identity-crafting, ideas of belonging, and migration. They offer opportunities for self-representation, shared imagination, meditation, and solidarity across borders. Drawing on this history, we’ll stitch and sew our own stories of home and migration into seaweed, the super algae which marks the border between land and sea.

Seaweeds serve the planet and its inhabitants in lots of ways – many of them are edible and full of nutrients; they clean up pollution in the water; they produce up to 70% of the Earth’s oxygen; and they can be transformed into sustainable textiles.

We won’t be making any fancy textiles with fancy processes, because we don’t need to. On its own, seaweed is flexible, rubbery, and perfect for piercing holes into. We’ll have seaweed, fabric, thread and seashore ephemera (shells, seaglass, rocks etc) to play with.

Saoirse will guide you through any techniques you’re unfamiliar with, but the process can be as simple or complicated as you like, and this workshop is very suitable for beginners.

This workshop is aimed at refugees, asylum seekers, Global Majority, people with personal or ancestral experiences of migration.

Event Info:

Those under 14 must be accompanied by an adult (due to sewing needles).

The Art Walk Project Space is located on the first floor, with no lift.  The walk to the beach is roughly 10 mins each way. For any specific access needs please get in touch in advance.

Places are limited. Please book in advance.