Julia Brennan has spent most of her career working for collectors, museums and private clients. She has repaired the clothes of historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln and mended family heirlooms.
In the past few years, however, the 62-year-old textile conservator has taken on jobs that are not only technically but also emotionally difficult. She has been reducing the damaging effects of time on textiles that tell the stories of human rights atrocities.
Some of the clothes Brennan has been repairing belonged to prisoners at a former Khmer Rouge prison in Cambodia in the 1970s. Others belonged to people killed in a church during the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. The torn and sometimes bloodied textiles show signs of the violent ways people were killed.
By repairing the clothes, Brennan hopes to help future generations remember the atrocities. As she told The New York Times, the garments are a record of “a person and an era”.