Resistance series, 2025

Exploring the role of resistance sits firmly in the hands of women, within the domestic realm. 

Under occupation, our lands get pillaged, our trees uprooted, our waterways polluted, our food reappropriated and our communities severed. 

The key to our past and the preservation of our future is firmly held in the hands of women and mothers, through stitch.

In this series, four images depict the simplicity of the everyday as acts of resistance that women preserve within our communities, which are overlayed with traditional tatreez stitched by Palestinian women and supported by Inaash. 

These have been stitched onto old handkerchiefs i have inherited from my grandmother, further highlighting the importance of connection to our past.

Cultivating our olive groves is a symbol of nurture to our indigenous land and its ancient trees and nature. This image is overlayed with traditional cross-stitched olive branches along the top and side.

The collection of water, carried in traditional clay pots, is our right to a natural resource that flows through our lands and is constantly under threat of being cut off or polluted. This is overlayed with traditional tatreez of various flowers that grow along the banks of the rivers where water is collected, highlighting the beauty and wilderness of our land. 

Cooking traditional recipes, using ingredients harvested from our land and the passing down of recipes from generations reinforces the matrilineal lineage from the hands of grandmothers to mothers. This forms part of our cultural identity which roots us to our families and our region. The women depicted in this scene are wrapping vine leaves [warak enab] and are overlayed with the traditional cross-stitch of vine leaves framing the image. 

Tatreez is the traditional embroidery which is the ultimate act of defiance. Each region of Palestine has its own unique style and motif. As women sit and stitch together as a collective, stories are shared and traditions of stitch preserved for generations to come. Here, the image is encircled by a selection of typical motifs from a different region of Palestine

Under occupation, all these aspects are constantly under threat of erasure, yet these collective acts of the everyday, maintained and upheld by women, serves to defy, resist and preserve a culture and a people that will never die.