But Garfen's creative effort to pay homage to lost Jews has, over the last two years, become more urgent – and more contemporary. In 2025 she launched an offshoot of Selection called Losing Faith, which spotlights shuls that have been attacked since the Holocaust and up to the present day. When it went on display last year in the National Holocaust Museum in Nottingham, Garfen had to embroider another lens to add to the installation after the murder of Adrian Daulby and Melvin Cravitz at Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester.
“In fact, it was quite symbolic,” she said. “I took it with me to the opening of the show, and they opened up the [display] so I could place this one in with all the others. It just shows how this issue is continuing – we’re not only looking back decades to the Holocaust. I'm stitching these in real time now, without a gap between past and present that might mean the emotions aren't so strong. And seeing the echoes of 1930s right here is quite terrifying.”
Losing Faith, 2025. Caren Garfen.[Missing Credit]
It certainly marks a shift in tone from Garfen’s early art career. For nearly 15 years, her work revolved around making miniature dolls house samplers – tiny hand-stitched embroideries at 1:12 scale – which she sold to adult collectors and showed at exhibitions and festivals.
"It was really successful, and it was just such a wonderful, comforting thing to do,” Garfen said.
But she felt an itch to expand her repertoire, and took a two-year course in creative embroidery before going on to pursue a bachelor’s degree in applied arts. This, she said, was a transformative experience.
“I went in as a doll house miniaturist, and I came out as an artist. I think I just needed that maturity to be able to create the works that I create now,” Garfen said.
She kept embroidery at the core of her artwork, but began applying her meticulous hand-stitching to a variety of mixed media projects with socially impactful messages. “It might take longer to do the hand stitching, but to tell the truth, I prefer it - I think it adds a really important dimension to the work because it slows everything down.”
Caren Garfen.[Missing Credit]
For the following eight years, Garfen’s created pieces that addressed gender politics and women's issues, including numerous works that examined popular diet culture and eating disorders. These pieces in particular had a profound effect on audiences; one exhibition showcasing a collection of works she’d made about eating disorders featured a kitchen as part of the installation, and the presence of a homely kitchen table invited an unexpected response from onlookers.
“Women just came in, sat down at the table with all their shopping bags and everything from the exhibition, and they started talking about their issues with dieting and how the exhibit had really affected them, and some people cried over it,” Garfen said.
Her work was later shown at several eating disorder conferences, further cementing Garfen’s capacity to create hard-hitting pieces with real social impact. It’s not something she took lightly, especially not when she began to shift her focus onto Jewish themes.
“Right the way through, whether it's from the Holocaust or beyond, it is a huge responsibility - it doesn't matter if it's today or yesterday,” Garfen said. “I'm very careful about what I stitch.”
A Taste of Things to Come, 2021. Caren Garfen.[Missing Credit]
In recent years Garfen has begun to attract more interest from Jewish organisations, but she said her pieces dealing with Jewish issues have largely been displayed in non-religious venues and exhibitions, whether in the UK, Europe, Japan, Canada, the US or Australia. Although she said she rarely creates artwork with audience perception in mind, the current climate for Jewish artists has added a new stressor to the experience of taking a piece from creation to public exhibition.
“As time goes on, I get more nervous about it, because of how things are and how artists are being affected or banned, or ghosted, or their works not being selected, or they're attacked at the venue,” Garfen said.
“These sorts of things are actually beginning to affect me because I think, well, this work has been selected now - let's hope nothing happens to it.”
It’s an especially pertinent consideration when it comes to one of her latest pieces, Are You Sitting Comfortably. The installation, set to debut in an embroidery exhibition at the Bath Fringe Arts festival in late May, is comprised of 50 miniature chairs, 49 of which represent the world’s Muslim-majority states and one representing the only Jewish-majority state: Israel. It is one of the only projects Garfen has created that deals with Israel and not just antisemitism.
Are You Sitting Comfortably, 2025. Caren Garfen.[Missing Credit]
"There are over 2 billion adherents to Islam, and the Jewish population is only 15 million,” Garfen said. “The work is a visual representation of this – why are you picking on the single tiny Jewish state?”
Garfen admitted that she was surprised that it was selected for the festival. "I'm not afraid to mention Israel and
I think it's really important that we do, so I'm grateful it's been selected - I shouldn't even say that they're brave to put it in, because it should just be normal. But that’s how it feels now.”
Garfen, who grew up in a secular Jewish household in London, is hopeful that things will improve both for Jewish artists as well as Jews writ large. But until then, she'll keep making artwork that points a finger at antisemitism and continually reminds the world of its innocent Jewish victims – regardless of how the pieces are perceived.
“Some people's views are so entrenched that no matter what you do or what you say or how gentle your work is, you're not going to change their mind,” Garfen said. “But my work - it's not political, it’s not confrontational.
It's just saying, ‘This is what happened, and this is what's happening now.’ And I think that's really important.”
