In Spin Club Stories, Astrid Reischwitz explores personal and cultural memory influenced by her upbringing in a small farming village in Northern Germany. She uses keepsakes from family life, old photographs and embroidered fabric from the village to build a world of memory, identity and home. The works speaks to the past and present as she weaves her own stories, taking cues from the old tradition of spin clubs in her village, where village women met to spin wool and create needlework—and share stories while they worked. She transforms this tradition of storytelling into a visual journey. Her own embroidered designs are partial representations of her ancestral linens, emphasizing the fragmentary nature of recollection. By following the stitches in these fabrics, she follows a path path through the lives of her ancestors and converses with the past.

You can purchase Spin Club Stories here.

I remember hiding beneath my grandmother’s beautifully adorned coffee table as a child. I can still hear the lilt of voices as she and the women in her Spinneklump, chatted above me in the local Plattdeutsch dialect. In our small farming village of Bortfeld in Lower Saxony, Germany,small groups of women used to meet regularly to spin wool, knit clothes, and embroider fabrics for the home, just like the generations of women before them.The hard-ships of farming and events of World War II cast a shadow over the villagers that can still be felt today. As they stitched, these women shared personal stories, offering moral support and advice which became a social glue joining many of them together over the duration of their lives. In a tiny village so bound by tradition, the spin club became a way to keep customs alive,until eventually, they shared anecdotes over coffee and cake instead of needlework. My work transforms this tradition of storytelling into a visual journey. – Astrid Reischwitz

Astrid Reischwitz is a lens-based artist whose work explores storytelling from a personal perspective. Her projects include intimate views of private spaces, and reflections on her own history and values. Using keepsakes from family life, old photographs, and storytelling strategies, she builds a visual world of memory, identity, place, and home. Her current work incorporates embroidery and examines personal and collective memory influenced by her upbringing in Germany.

Reischwitz has exhibited at national and international museums and galleries including the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, Newport Art Museum, Griffin Museum of Photography, Danforth Art Museum, Photographic Resource Center, The Center for Fine Art Photography (CO), Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, Center for Photographic Art (CA), FotoNostrum, BBA Gallery, Dina Mitrani Gallery and Gallery Kayafas. She has   received multiple awards, including the 2020 Griffin Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography and the Multimedia Award at the 2020 San Francisco Bay International Photo Awards. Her series “Spin Club Tapestry” was selected as a Juror’s Pick at the 2021 LensCulture Art Photography Awards and is the Series Winner at the 2021 Siena International Photo Awards. She is a four-time Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 photographer and is a Mass Cultural Council 2021 Artist Fellowship Finalist in Photography. Her first monograph Spin Club Stories was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2022. It was shortlisted for the 2022 Lucie Photo Book Prize and received Silver placement at the 2022 Budapest International Foto Awards.

Reischwitz is a graduate of the Technical University Braunschweig, Germany, with a PhD in Chemistry. After moving to the US, she fell in love with photography and began her journey to explore life through creating art.

She is represented by Gallery Kayafas in Boston, Massachusetts.

Follow Astrid Reischwitz on instagram: @astridreischwitz