Alice Bowen-Churchill has spent the last several summers running a stitch table in some of the least likely places for quiet, careful handwork… right in front of Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage, inside a refugee arts collective in Bristol, and at countless festivals across the UK. Her collaborative embroidery project with Oxfam, currently traveling under the banner of Oxfam’s No More Radio Silence campaign, has become something much bigger than a festival activity… it’s a way of gathering voices, stitch by stitch, onto a single piece of cloth. We caught up with Alice ahead of this summer’s season to hear how it all came together.
We’re offering our sincere gratitude to Alice to taking the time with us to share not only her story, but to foster that story-telling and creativity in countless others.
*note: the below is pulled from an audio transcript.
How did the Oxfam partnership even begin?
I was teaching textiles at the time, in an area of Somerset really close to Glastonbury. I’d grown up going to that festival. It’s one of the biggest in the world, and I felt so lucky to have it on my doorstep. I was teaching art as well as textiles, and I really wanted that creative energy from the festival to be something we shared with our students. So many of them went every year; I felt like we should be embracing that energy.
I put together a proposal to do a project with my students at the festival; they came back with something different: for the festival’s 50th anniversary with the Joint Charities Trust, they wanted me to make a giant flag. I’d never done anything like that before, but I said yes.
Oxfam is part of the Joint Charities Trust for Glastonbury, alongside WaterAid and Greenpeace, I’d be collaborating with them, working to their brief, but leading as the artist.
Then, about two weeks later, we went into lockdown, and it all got put on hold. But I kept the relationship going. When we came back two years later, they asked if I was still up for it. At the time I was mid-way through a master’s in textiles, on sabbatical from teaching, and my brain was completely locked into developing my own creative practice. It felt like the right moment to lead with this. So, I made a flag about six by five metres wide, made from recycled hot air balloon fabric— there’s a hot air balloon factory in Bristol— with tassels carrying messages and pledges people had written beforehand. It was dropped from the centre of one of the stages. There’s a little video of it on my Instagram.
Finding the Format
I’d seen the Red Dress Project… Kirstie Macleod, lives in my parents’ tiny village in Somerset. She’d come into my college to work with my students, so it’s funny that she has this global reach and I also just know her as a lovely woman from my village.
I thought that this kind of collaborative stitching could work in a festival setting, so I found two vintage dresses. Oxfam has a long history with secondhand clothing, so it felt right to source them that way instead.
It was a bit of a gamble whether stitching would even work in a festival field. We were set up right in front of the Pyramid Stage— loud music, told to wear earplugs… that whole environment. There were moments I thought, this really isn’t the right spot for this. But it turned out that’s exactly why it worked. People were looking for somewhere quiet, an activity that took them to a different headspace than the party energy around them. Festivals are a mix of both. They’re hedonistic, but they also pull you out of your everyday world. I always leave Glastonbury Festival thinking, how can I make things better?
Oxfam’s campaign resonates with people immediately… there’s nothing radical about it; it just makes sense. We need to eradicate poverty. We need to help people whose voices aren’t being heard. The stitching gave people a chance to sit quietly and talk. Sometimes the conversations were about the campaigns themselves, sometimes about whatever was happening in the wider world. The first year we were at Glastonbury in 2023, it was the same weekend as the Roe v. Wade decision, and that came up in conversation too.
Why Stitching Gets People Talking
Anyone who’s done collaborative stitching knows—or, well, it’s a grand way of putting it, just sitting around stitching a quilt together, which people have done for centuries— there’s something about the repetitive motion. By the time you’ve done fifty stitches, you know what you’re doing; you’re just repeating it, and you don’t have to look up or make eye contact. Your mind goes somewhere else, and people just open up.
My colleague Sue Green and I noticed this a lot when we taught textiles to 16-18 year-olds. Our group was mostly girls, sometimes boys too, and we always knew who was dating who— all the gossip. People used to ask how we knew, and it was because they’d sit and talk while they stitched. Meanwhile, the students doing art were often more furiously concentrated on drawing or sculpture… more technical, more physical focus. But with hand stitching, people talk, often in a circle where you can see it happening.
So I think I already half-knew that’s what would happen when I set this up at the festival, and it did. People met each other around the dress and started stitching. Some couldn’t sew at all, some where trained at the royal school of needlework, I wanted anyone to be able to contribute. If everyone just did one stitch, that becomes part of the bigger picture.
From there in 2024, I made a dress out of tents, and then last year we moved on to the Milaya. The whole time, I’d see people actively coming to find me at the festivals. They’d remember where the stitching space had been and come looking for it. There was an 11 year-old boy who came back every single day for five days. He didn’t know how to stitch when he started, and by the end he was completely hooked. It became how he wanted to start his mornings.
Building a Safe Space Inside the Chaos
I went to Glastonbury a lot when I was younger, and after having children, I thought I’d be able to go straight back into it the same way. The first time I went back, I had an absolutely massive panic attack. I couldn’t cope… I had to come home. I was lucky I had that option, but it might not have been the same for everyone. It took me nearly ten years before I could go back into that kind of space and say, okay, I want to do festivals again, but I need to do it on my own terms.
That’s really where this all connects for me. I wanted to create an environment that helps tell these stories and supports the campaign, but that’s also a genuinely safe space— somewhere people can step out of the noise and take some time. It’s been such a wonderful thing to build. I feel lucky that Joe Goodman at Oxfam and I found each other at exactly the right moment, both wanting to do something like this, and it’s been such a joy ever since.
Learning the Milaya’s History
This is the bit I’d really like to research more, and I want to be upfront that I’m still piecing it together. As I understand it, a Milaya is a bedspread— a piece of cloth heavily embroidered in the center, with images of flowers, animals, plants, birds. Very joyful, very hopeful. There’s usually a central design, on a colored piece of cloth.
Joe, who works for Oxfam, found out about the Milaya project, which was started by a photographer for National Geographic. She came across women in the Bidi Bidi refugee camp in Uganda who’d come from South Sudan, carrying all their belongings in these pieces of cloth. It seems to be something you’re given when you marry— maybe traditionally stitched by the community for the family or the bride— though I’ve also read that people are sometimes buried in them, which might be part of why there aren’t any in textile collections.
After the festival last year, it felt really important to me to find people who were actually from Sudan or South Sudan and ask if they knew the tradition. I got in touch with a group in Bristol called BRAC (Bristol Refugee Art Collective) and sat down with three women from Sudan. They immediately said, ‘we’ve heard about this project, thank you so much for remembering us, for highlighting this.’ The first thing they asked was how I even knew about the Milaya. We sat together, and they stitched into the cloth while telling me about stitching with their grandmothers, about remembering. That’s the moment I realized this couldn’t just be about festivals… it had to be about this wider story.
Taking It Beyond the Festival
That’s part of why it felt important to take this out of the festival setting altogether. Festivals are, in a way, quite exclusive. So this year, without Glastonbury on the calendar, I’ve been able to focus on reaching a wider range of people in other spaces.
I’m working with the same refugee group again, and with another organization in Bristol called Borderlands. I’m also doing sessions in a couple of galleries, and hopefully at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which felt especially meaningful, since Oxfam originated in Oxford. The Pitt Rivers has an extraordinary, quite colonial collection, and they’ve been doing real work around decolonizing how it’s presented. I went to a talk there recently where they had textile pieces from Palestine on display, and I was able to look closely at the stitch work. I’m hoping to run sessions with some of the groups connected to that collection too.
This year’s campaign is called No More Radio Silence— about shining a light on humanitarian crises that don’t get talked about in the media. Sudan, Palestine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rohingya Refugees fleeing Myanmar. What’s interesting is watching which of these suddenly break into the news. Sudan did last year, and now there’s some attention on the Ebola outbreak in DRC too. It makes you notice how selective that attention can be.
I’ve been looking at historic textiles from all of these regions, and the Milaya feels like a really natural vehicle for that conversation. This year, instead of stitching onto printed fabric, I wanted it to be onto something secondhand. I bought a white quilt and I’m translating the image onto that as an outline, almost like a coloring-in guide, for people to stitch onto.
On the Thread Itself
*note: we sent Alice Aurifil Cotton 8wt and Cotton 12wt on cones for this year’s events.
The threads are just gorgeous. I love them so much, and I feel so lucky to have found you as a company. It was actually the woman from Stitch School, who bought our embroidery table from, who suggested I reach out to you.
When you’re working with people who’ve never stitched before, there are things you have to think about… threading needles is a real issue, for one. One of the reasons the slightly finer weight works so well is that you can double it up and tie a knot, so the needle isn’t coming off every five seconds. That’s not just younger stitchers, it’s most people who aren’t experienced with needlework.
It also means the back of the work is chaos. If you were a trained embroiderer you’d be horrified. I don’t mind that at all… I always say the back tells another story. The front is the neat, tidy version, and the back is the chaos of the world we actually live in. Whereas if you look at the back of the original Milaya samples, it’s immaculate. You can barely tell front from back. Mine is nowhere close.
I’m not a technically trained embroiderer… textiles is something I live and breathe, but it’s a vehicle for creativity for me rather than something I approach with strict technique. That said, I do believe firmly in giving people the right tools. When I work with kids, I use sharp scissors, sharp needles, proper thread. People worry about kids hurting themselves with needles, but you teach them how to use them properly, and they’re fine.
This year, using a quilt rather than printed fabric, I also didn’t want anything too heavy— I wanted it to be accessible, easy to stitch through. There’s a lovely sheen to the finer weight too. I’ve done samples stitching one direction and then the other, and it catches the light beautifully.
Where the Cloth Goes From Here
When I first started talking to Oxfam about this, I was clear I didn’t want it to just be for the festival. So much creative work made for events just gets put aside once the event ends. A classic example: the flag I made that first year went missing as soon as the festival finished. A year later it turned up in a chest freezer that had been switched off, somewhere on site. Someone found it and thought, maybe she wants this back? I do have it now, which is great, but it’s exactly why I’m so clear that these pieces need a life beyond the moment they were made in.
I’d love to put together an exhibition eventually, to show all these different pieces together. I think I forget the impact sometimes, because I’ve lived so closely with it day to day. When I look at the finished pieces, I can see the individual stories in them. I can point to the stitches the eleven-year-old boy did first. On the tent dress, I worked with a group of adults with learning difficulties. There was a man with Down syndrome who’d never stitched before and needed someone to stitch alongside him, and a woman with one arm, with someone holding the hoop while she worked. Those details carry real weight, and I think about whether they should be shared alongside the pieces themselves.
None of these groups knows if they’ll have funding to exist next year, and that’s a hard thing to sit with. Where do people go if these spaces disappear? I feel lucky to have been able to work in them at all. This year I managed to get more funding, and it means we could develop the project beyond the festivals to reach more people. Going forward, I’d also like to properly document names and hours stitched. Right now we have a rough idea of how many people have taken part, but I want to be able to say it with more certainty.
Where the Project Stands Now
Since we spoke, Alice has completed her stops at Latitude Festival and Boardmasters. At Latitude alone, 108 individual stitchers added their hands to the cloth over just three days. The Milaya’s journey isn’t finished yet: upcoming sessions are planned in Oxford, London, Bristol, and Manchester, carrying the project further into the community spaces Alice was most excited to reach this year.
We’re so grateful to Alice for taking the time to sit with us and share this story so generously. The work she’s creating out in the world, stitch by stitch, is making a real impact, and we’re thrilled to be even the smallest part of it.
If you’d like to get involved, host a stitch event, or simply follow along as the piece grows, you can reach Alice via the buttons below.