Stitch Their Names Together
Old Dunnes Stores Building October 22nd - 27th 12pm - 8pm
Opening Wednesday 22nd of October at 7pm
An Exhibit by Mary Evers
In this installation, we honour lives lost in Gaza during 2023-2025 through the lens of Tatreez, traditional Palestinian embroidery. Each name stitched transforms anonymous statistics back into individuals with stories, dreams, and families.
Embroidery has historically served as a women's method of recording history across cultures. In Palestine, Tatreez documents generations of heritage and resistance. Our work extends this tradition, creating a tactile memorial where each stitch acknowledges a life violently taken.
Using the colours of the Palestinian flag—red for women, black for men, green for children—we create a visual testament that reveals the human dimensions of loss.
For the embroiderers, this work offers a meditative space to process overwhelming tragedy. The repetitive act of stitching provides a physical channel for grief that might otherwise remain abstract. Many describe speaking names aloud while working, creating a profound connection to those they commemorate.
For viewers, the installation creates an intimate encounter with loss at human scale. Where news reports present overwhelming numbers, here you face individual names made tangible. We recognize that responses to loss are as varied as the lives behind each name—sadness, anger, guilt, even delayed grief. However you feel, or do not yet feel, you are part of this act of remembrance.
The deliberate slowness of hand-stitching becomes political in our accelerated information age—a counterpoint to rapidly scrolling death counts that permit no time for comprehension or mourning.
Through this international sewing circle, participants find solidarity in shared creative action. Many describe experiencing both profound sorrow and meaningful purpose while working.
Each stitch stands as testimony: these lives mattered. They will be remembered. And in remembering, we resist.
Mary Evers brings her diverse background to “Hudur Al-Gha’ibin - Presence of the Absent", a collaborative textile art project honouring victims of the Gaza genocide mirroring the ancient Palestinian embroidery tradition of Tatreez.
Born in Dublin and raised throughout the Mashriq region where her father worked with Palestinian refugees, Mary's deep connection to Palestinian culture began in childhood. Educated in Arabic and French at Jerusalem's Notre Dame de Sion school, she developed multicultural perspectives that inform her work today. After careers spanning biochemistry, software engineering, and three decades as an Osteopath, Mary has dedicated her retirement to humanitarian causes and activism, particularly focusing on Palestinian rights.