A New Collaboration Explores the Power of Craft in Times of Confinement

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a former prisoner in Iran, has turned her experience of six years of arbitrary detention into a powerful statement of resistance through creativity. Her journey, marked by the making of a small patchwork cushion from scraps of fabric using the only sewing machine available in her prison, has now inspired a new collaboration between London’s Imperial War Museum (IWM) and the fabric department of Liberty. This project, titled Creativity in Conflict and Confinement, highlights the role of craft during war, conflict, and incarceration.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who recently returned to London, has worked closely with Liberty’s in-house studio to create three new fabric prints that reflect her time in prison. These designs, including Passage of Time, Obscured Landscape, and Stitch and Community, draw on themes of resilience, hope, and solidarity. The project not only showcases her personal story but also explores the broader historical context of how people have used craft to retain dignity and survive in difficult circumstances.

The collaboration includes a display at the IWM, where the new fabrics are featured on large hanging banners and will remain until February 2026. Additionally, the designs will be available in a new retail range, with proceeds supporting the charity Fine Cell Work, which provides paid craftwork opportunities to people in prison. Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s story and the project as a whole emphasize the enduring power of creativity as a means of resistance and survival.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s experience in prison involved sewing clothes for her daughter using the only sewing machine in the facility. She had accumulated Liberty fabrics over the years and managed to have some sent to her while in prison. She shared these materials with fellow inmates, learning various craft skills such as woodwork and knitting through a rehabilitation program.

The project draws on pieces from the IWM’s collections, which uncover the ways people have turned to craftwork as a means of retaining dignity and surviving. One IWM display features a wooden figure made in 1919 by a disabled ex-soldier at the Lord Roberts Memorial Workshops, where men wounded in the first world war were trained in craft as a way back into work and purpose.

Prof Sir Simon Wessely, an IWM associate, notes that the link between craft and resilience is longstanding: “In the face of trauma and confinement, creativity helps restore agency, identity, and hope. It has always been a way to process pain and reclaim resilience.”

Against this backdrop, Liberty designers worked with Zaghari-Ratcliffe to create the three new fabrics, each reflecting different themes that shaped her confinement. Obscured Landscape layers geometric patterns from the Liberty archive over sketches by the British war artist Anthony Gross. Stitch and Community, the most personal of the set, overlays Liberty florals on various private papers from army generals and prisoners in the IWM collection, evoking the solidarity Zaghari-Ratcliffe felt with her fellow prisoners.

For Liberty, whose store operated during the second world war, the project is also a return to its own history of creativity under pressure.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe emphasizes that these fabrics cover many elements related to incarceration—time, hope, resilience—but more than anything else, solidarity. “You’re collectively enduring this pain and you got through it together.”