Embroidered textile 'Connected by a Thread' by Tina Crawford, 2020. Squares of medical scrubs fabric in three shades of blue, and one black, sewn onto a red velvet background two metres square. Every square has an image embroidered in white, with the thread joining each square to the next. A border of yellow dusters surrounds the whole, with text embroidered in different colours. The back is patched with purple, orange, yellow, green and blue squares.

Created in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Tina Crawford’s ‘Connected by a Thread’ weaves a visual and material story of community, support and connectedness during the first UK lockdown. It reflects a unique mass encounter with public health and shows how digitally connected communities coped with life in lockdown. Crawford captures a moment of reflection and surprising positivity as people considered their lives and what they would keep and dispose on returning to ‘normal’.

Beginning in March 2020, Crawford used social media to invite inspiration and contributions using the hashtags #lockdownmoments and #lockdownhighlights. She embroidered each image onto a square of fabric, building a shared set of experiences that are both physically and conceptually ‘Connected by a Thread’. Midway through the project, she changed the hashtag from ‘moments’ to ‘highlights’, noting that the responses were unexpectedly positive and joyful: “babies born, birthdays celebrated, and lots of love for pets”.

The piece developed in Crawford’s home in Croydon from March to September 2020. It features over 100 stories, quotes and a poem. Highlights include a lockdown romance, new puppies, clapping for the NHS, gardening, and pride in being a keyworker, as well as other artists’ lockdown projects, such as ‘Portrait Artist of the Week’ or ‘Grayson’s Art Club’. Celebrities also contributed, including presenter Mel Giedroyc, musician Sophie Ellis-Bextor and comedian Rachel Parris.

The materials of the piece were also sourced through social media, when Stag and Bow (a haberdashery in Forest Hill, south London) offered via Instagram a collection of offcuts and scraps from a group that had been stitching NHS scrubs. Stitched in white onto blue scrubs offcuts, the piece thus echoes the materials of the NHS on the front, while showing a rainbow of colours on the back. It speaks to the story of community responses to the lack of NHS scrubs, community-sewing initiatives, and public support for NHS workers through rainbow imagery.

Among the shades of blue is an individual black square. This deliberately coincided with ‘Blackout Tuesday’ – a social media campaign on 2 June 2020 – launched to increase awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement, which was amplified in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in America. By filling social media with black squares and people muting their accounts, it was hoped the campaign would free up time usually dedicated to social media for people to educate themselves on the Black Lives Matter movement. Crawford captured this significant moment, cutting the continuous thread seen throughout the rest of the piece for emphasis.

The size of the red velvet is a deliberate physical representation of the two-metre rule, the distance people had to keep away from each other under UK government guidelines. Likewise, Crawford chose the rich velvet as a tactile material that people would instantly want to touch, the one thing disallowed by the pandemic. Bright yellow dust cloths form a border around the artwork, added towards the end of lockdown and reflecting the increased cleaning to avoid the virus. Crawford noted the change in public attitudes to lockdown as the months passed, embroidering onto the dust cloths government slogans such as ‘Hands, Face, Space’ and overheard discussions questioning the reality of the crisis. From its starting message of positivity, ‘Connected by a Thread’ therefore expands the lockdown story towards the end of 2020, when people began to reflect on the handling of the pandemic more critically.