In Aasha John’s woven photographs, memory becomes a tactile act of resistance across generations and geographies.
26 May 2026
In ‘As I Weave’, Trinidad-born, London-based artist Aasha John transforms family archives into sites of emotional excavation, threading together photography, oral history and textile practice to map the fragile architectures of memory. Presented at Autograph, the exhibition emerges from the artist’s Visible Practice Residency and centres on woven photographic works shaped through conversations with family members across Trinidad and London.
John’s process is deliberate and intimate. Family photographs are cut, interlaced and rewoven by hand, creating surfaces where remembrance is never fixed, but constantly shifting under the pressures of migration, distance and time. Fragments remain visible. Faces dissolve into thread. Silence occupies space as powerfully as speech. In these works, absence is not something to overcome, but something to hold.
What unfolds is less a reconstruction of personal history than an exploration of how memory survives rupture. Weaving becomes both method and metaphor, binding together diasporic experience, familial longing and inherited ritual. Through tactile repetition and deep listening, John offers an expanded understanding of the archive: one rooted not in preservation alone, but in care, labour and the emotional weight of return.
This exhibition is on view at Autograph, London, from 3 to 6 June 2026.
