Katie Treggiden's feature ran as new right-to-repair rules came into force in the United Kingdom, asking what a revived culture of mending means for the people who make things. Aya Haidar, who is represented by Tabari Artspace, is among the five artists and designers it follows, and her embroidery gives the piece its central image of repair as something other than a return to the original state.
Treggiden sets the legislation against a longer history, from the wartime Make Do and Mend campaign to the shortening lifespans of household goods, drawing on the design historian Hazel Clark, Janet Gunter of The Restart Project and the MP Philip Dunne. Aya Haidar describes Recollections, in which photographs of war-damaged buildings in Beirut are stitched with coloured thread so that bullet holes are filled in with colour rather than erased, and speaks of her Lebanese family leaving the war in 1982 for Saudi Arabia and then London. Her Soleless series embroiders scenes from migrants' journeys onto the worn soles of shoes; she says she could not give those shoes back their function, but could show what they had carried. The article also takes in Jay Blades and the BBC's The Repair Shop, the maker Bridget Harvey and her mended garments, and R for Repair at Singapore's National Design Centre.
Haidar has long used domestic needlework to hold accounts of displacement. The feature placed that work before a general British readership and within a broader repair movement, rather than inside an art-world frame.
