TEXTILE TALES in protest.
Because oh-my-days is there enough to get up off our seats about.
The UK AIDS Memorial Quilt was just shown in the turbine Hall in Tate Modern, London - it received 70,000 visitors in just 5 days. ‘That’s 70,000 acts of remembrance. 70,000 people witnessing love, protest, and grief - stitched into fabric.’
Quilt by Zac Foser and Lisa Whitmer
‘We, the People’ is 76 embroidered maps by Varunika Saraf that attempts to chart an alternative timeline of India.
Above and below, Aya Haidar. ‘My current work focuses on the recycling of found and disposable objects making poetic works that explore labour, displacement, domesticity, womanhood and memory’
By Annegret Soltau
A co-creation project led by Cannupa Hanska Luger. Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Queer and Trans Relatives Bead Project. Composed of over 4000 individual handmade clay beads created by hundreds of communities across the so called U.S. and Canada, Every One re-humanizes the data of missing and murdered Indigenous people.
Bisa Butler - I Am Not Your Negro. Quilted and appliquéd cotton, wool, and chiffon & quilted cotton.
Gathered waste textile garment by Mira Musank in response to images of the mountain of textile waste in Ghana
By Anshu Singh
By Willemien de Villers, ‘The act of stitching allows for a processing of complex or difficult emotions. In this slow, quiet, meditative engagement, the seemingly simple act of pushing a needle through fabric fashions an oeuvre which has shifted the action of both psychic and bodily violence to the action of restoration and healing.’
Basket woven from cut strips of photographic paper, printed with a color images of historic Cherokee documents. The outside layer is woven with "splints" of the Treaty of New Echota, and the inside layer with "splints" of 95 pages of protest signatures. By Shan Goshorn
Plant dye quilt by Dr Jess Bailey / Public Library Quilts for the Land in Our Names collective, who work to reconnect Black and People of Colour to land, both in the city and the countryside.
Her insta is a trove of protest quilt history, info and archive.
And finally, Fluid Geographies by Reena Kallat - which evokes reflections upon artificially drawn cartographic borders and the territorial disputes surrounding them.
This is such a tiny selection I hope to revisit the topic soon. For now, hope you enjoy, if you get a chance to explore deeper into any of these artists it’s totally worth it. As always, you can find me here on Instagram. Peace xxx
Great post!!