Survivors’ Network, the local Rape Crisis Centre, are exhibiting a range of past, current and brand new creative projects for Sexual Assault and Sexual Violence Awareness Week.

Join us for a day of taking back control of the narrative around sexual violence through creativity – be it photography, the written word, knitting needles or embroidery thread. Help us send messages of love to survivors, express your solidarity through our new sewing project, see the finished Survivors’ Knitwork and experience the words and drawings of survivors through our archive of the survivor-led magazine Speak Out.

We will be featuring photography from Ryshel Patel based on conversations with survivors on where they feel is a “safe space” in Sussex, displaying a beautiful hand-sewn banner from the early days of Survivors’ Network, sharing our more recent creative projects and launching our brand new project, SEWlidarity.

SEWlidarity brings together survivors and supporters to create a banner of solidarity. Inspired by a creative project from Survivors’ Network’s past, where a banner was made when the organisation was created for adult survivors of sexual abuse, we want to create a modern message of solidarity through the arts.

We invite you to come along, write/sew/embroider/cut+stick a square with your own message of love and solidarity to survivors everywhere. Each square will be sewn together to create a banner to broadcast our solidarity to the world. Survivors’ Network will continue the project through 2019, in the hopes that our completed banner will be carried at the annual Reclaim the Night demonstration in November.

About the Artist

Ryshel Patel is a budding photographer, and recent geography and media graduate from the University of Sussex. Curious of the relationship between media, space and development, she obtained a position in a MA Media Practice for Development and Social Change course where practice and theory merged. It is here she explored the strengths of the #MeToo movement, the prevailing inequalities between genders, and was opened up to by beloved friends who spoke of their own experiences of sexual harassment and abuse. Inspired by this, she decided to take up an internship at Survivors’ Network, where she hoped to contribute to as well as learn more from colleagues and service users. Ryshel believes the media has great strengths (and flaws) in representing marginalised voices. With such a power, we even in our everyday lives have a responsibility to be kind and make sure we yield it wisely in ways which it celebrates and champions others, and even ourselves.