They can't take away your imagination and creativity': Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe on how sewing helped her in Iran jail

"When Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe returned home to London after six years of arbitrary detention in Iran, she brought back with her a small patchwork cushion. Pieced together from scrap material and made with the single sewing machine available in the prison, it was the product of a communal craft circle. It's something very, very precious to me, she said. So precious, in fact, that she has worked on a new collaboration between London's Imperial War Museum (IWM) and the fabric department of Liberty,"

"We used to say, when I was in prison, that they can take away the world you live in, but they can't take away what's happening in your mind, your imagination and your creativity. Holding on to that was how we survived. It makes me so proud, she says of the project. It is this idea, creativity as a form of resistance, that sits at the heart of the collaboration."

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe returned to London after six years' arbitrary detention in Iran and brought a small patchwork cushion made in prison. She collaborated with London's Imperial War Museum and Liberty's fabric department to create three prints exploring prisoner experience. One print, Passage of Time, features doves, Tehran rooftops, moon phases and repeating seasons glimpsed through cell cracks. She sewed clothes for her daughter on the prison's only sewing machine. The initiative, titled Creativity in Conflict and Confinement, examines craft during war, conflict and incarceration and positions creativity as a means of survival, resistance and psychological sustenance.

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