As a child, Emilia Martin spent countless hours observing her beloved grandmother, a Polish countryside textile worker, stitching scraps of material into objects that were new, soft and enduring. Like a storyteller weaving elements into a tale, her textiles were composed of many fibres, many threads and many hands reaching back through time. Textile-making became her language, carrying the knowledge of generations of women. When Martin’s grandmother passed away, her works, perceived as having no value, were discarded or lost. Inspired by this missing archive of a life’s work, Martin began tracing other histories of women whose textiles serve as ghosts where records fall silent, continuing an intergenerational legacy of weaving scraps into stories.

The Serpent’s Thread follows fragmented records and folklore surrounding the five Andersson sisters, who lived in the small Swedish village of Åsmundtorp at the turn of the 20th century. Their history, partly documented and partly mythologised, revolves around the textiles they produced as elaborate dowries – objects meant to demonstrate a woman’s skill, diligence and moral worth, and to represent her value as a potential future wife.