91Èȱ¬

In June 1994 the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt was unveiled in London's Hyde Park. Commemorating the lives of nearly 400 people, each panel was lovingly created by the family, friends or lovers of someone who had lost their life.

Tom Foskett-Barnes explored the legacy of this rarely seen artefact in Quilts of Love for Radio 3's Between the Ears - available now on 91Èȱ¬ Sounds.

Barton Friedland, the Project Coordinator of the 1994 UK AIDS Memorial Quilt, explained to Tom how he chanced upon the AIDS Memorial Quilt while on a visit to Washington DC in 1992.

He said: "It happened to be laid out on the Mall. I didn't even know about it, that's how ignorant I was!"

Friedland revealed that the scale of the event took him aback.

He explained: "At a certain point walking through the quilt I looked up and I could not see the end of the people - the live people, not the dead ones.

"I realised this is not about the dead people, this is about the live people realising the impact the dead people had that can never be taken away.

"And I got inspired to bring the quilt to the UK."

The huge stigma that existed around AIDS in the 1980s, explored recently by , meant there was "no national, formal recognition or ".

Rather it was a grassroots project, in the form of the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt, which came to play that role.

The is made up of 48 panels, each of which contains a series of smaller panels within.

When exhibited, personal testimonials, photos and documents are also used to reveal more about the emotional stories behind the panels.

Among those memorialised in fabric are Indiana Jones actor Denham Elliot and the artist Derek Jarman.

As well as learning about the origins of the project from Barton Friedland, Tom also spoke with some of the charities involved in putting the quilts back on display - the first time the entire collection had been shown since 1994.

Anna Brewster, Volunteer and Services Manager at The Food Chain, described how the new exhibition exposed the stigma that remained around HIV.

She said: "One of our service users came to see the exhibition and one of the things he found the most difficult was the love that went into the panels that people's famillies created for people they had lost - their sons, their brothers, their family members.

"When he disclosed his HIV status his family disowned him and still to this day won't speak to him. So it was really hard seeing how much love was expressed for these people but wasn't expressed for him.

"This is not a piece of lost history, this is still an impact that is being felt by people who are living today."

Audio work by seven 91Èȱ¬ New Creatives artists featured on Between the Ears in November - you can listen to all the pieces on 91Èȱ¬ Sounds.

91Èȱ¬ New Creatives is a scheme for emerging artistic talent supported by 91Èȱ¬ Arts and Arts Council England.

A version of this article was first published 8 November 2021