Seamstress — Reimagining Industrial Migratory

About this work

Seamstress is the second major tableau in The Exiles series, made in 2022 as part of the [Traveller, Your Footprints] exhibition at New Art Exchange, Nottingham.

The woman reading a letter in Dayshift (2019) returns in this image — connecting the domestic act of correspondence with the industrial space of labour. Billy Dosanjh has noted that many of the women in his community worked in sewing factories, and that these factories were “unscrupulous places in terms of fair payment and health and safety.”

The image holds together tenderness and exploitation: the act of reading — a private, longing gesture — set against the mechanical repetition of industrial work.

RBSA First Prize

Seamstress was entered alongside Dayshift into the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists Photography Prize Exhibition, for which Billy was awarded First Prize.

Exhibition history

Seamstress has been shown as part of [Traveller, Your Footprints] at New Art Exchange, Nottingham (23 September 2022 – 7 January 2023) and The Exiles at The New Art Gallery Walsall (11 November 2022 – 6 February 2023).

Community response

New Art Exchange’s Saturday Art Sessions incorporated The Exiles images — including Seamstress — into drop-in workshops focused on displaced people and third-culture children. One parent noted that through the work, their child “could taste a culture she never knew before through art.”