CRAFTING FOR SURVIVAL

During nearly six years of detention in Iran, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe discovered that making things could be an act of resistance: a way to preserve identity, create beauty and retain some measure of freedom in a place designed to take it away.

In conversation with Harper’s Bazaar editor Helena Lee, she reflects on the friendships and creative practices that sustained her in prison, and on her recent journey to Japan, where encounters with artists and craftspeople opened up new questions about patience, repair and renewal.

What can our hands express when words are inadequate? And how can creativity help us endure, recover and begin again?