There Are No Ugly Women – Revolution 1905 🧵👩

This project is my first work in embroidery. It is rooted in my personal experience and inspired by the figure of Helena Rubinstein. My own story is interwoven here with her vision, one in which beauty became a path toward women’s independence.

For this project, I created more than two thousand drawings based on photographs from online archives. Each drawing was then transformed into embroidery, forming a multilayered narrative composed of two distinct strata.

The first layer portrays scenes from women’s history at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the arduous work of seamstresses in the textile factories of Łódź, the suppression of protests during the 1905 Revolution, and the trafficking of women by organised networks such as Zwi Migdal, a criminal organisation associated with Warsaw that trafficked young women to brothels in South America. These are images of economic violence, exploitation, and the limited possibilities that shaped women’s lives at the time. I embroidered this layer using a machine embroidery technique on fabrics that evoke those used during that period.

The second layer, visible only through a small opening in the first, is far more personal. It reveals my own image, hand-embroidered using the goldwork technique, with gold thread and natural pearls. It is my gesture of gratitude toward earlier generations of women, whose suffering and struggle helped make possible the freedom I have today, the freedom to develop, to create, and to determine my own path in life.

The project consists of eight embroidered works, each giving voice to the stories of women across generations.

The complete project comprises 8 embroidered works, each tracing a different fate, a different woman’s story.

Dimensions: 120 x 80 cm
Materials: First layer: archival material – linen. Second layer: wool, cultured pearls, goldwork embroidery technique (metallic threads).

Pictures: Wojciech Radzki

This project was made possible through the support of Daniil Revkovskyi and was funded by the “Młoda Polska” scholarship program of the National Centre for Culture (Narodowe Centrum Kultury), Poland.

More works will be added to the site soon.