Craft Culture
‘C19 Text Talk’ is a hand embroidered diary, comprised of 50 text works, made over a period of 100 days since the enforcement of the UK lockdown on the 23rd March 2020. Each work was made in direct response to the COVID-19 global pandemic, a combination of government guidelines, media quotations and my personal responses to the […]
Find out more about Black Girl Knit Club… Started in January 2019 in East London by friends Sicgmone Kludje & Vea Koranteng, the Black Girl Knit Club was set up to empower black women through craft and to answer the call for more diversity in the craft community. MISSION STATMENT: Our aim is to create […]
Veiled Voices 2020 is an inclusive community embroidery project, which invites women across the UK to come together and explore perceptions of Hijab wearing in Britain, with the aim of creating understanding and friendship. Together we are creating a collaborative embroidery which will become a visual representation of the thoughts, beliefs and questions of the […]
For readers unfamiliar with your work, could you give us a brief overview of why Stitches in Time was first set up and what it aims to achieve? Stitches in Time began as an experiment to see if sewing could start conversations between strangers. This small experiment in 1993 turned into our giant founding project, the […]
In the summer of 2012 the country celebrated the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and temperatures soared just in time for us to bask in the sunshine and glory of the Olympics. For those few months the entire country tingled with national pride – or so every newspaper in the country would have you believe. But behind […]
North London based artist and activist Rachelle Romeo’s work caught our eye with its powerful and poetic use of embroidery. Romeo’s stitched stories of trauma, belonging, and becoming are literally mapped onto the landscapes of London and the UK – striking visual reminders of the brutal colonial legacies and ongoing trauma of the Windrush scandal […]
Amy E. Elkins reviews handiwork by Sara Baume I am amazed by craft’s enduring capacity to express complexity in a time of crisis. In Sara Baume’s new book, handiwork, the crisis is both intimate and global.[1] Strikingly printed by Tramp Press in Ireland, handiwork invites the reader into spaces of reflection, an invitation made material […]
When one imagines a needlewoman from the early twentieth century, one is likely to envisage a pale and subservient figure, skirts sweeping the floor as she sits beside the fire, needle in hand, forging upon her lap another testament of her love for the husband she awaits so patiently. One will not see a smashed […]
I have recently encountered Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the ‘rhizome’’, says Mary Sibande. ‘They say a rhizome has neither a beginning nor and end, but always a middle.’ The South African artist was referring specifically to her series of sculpture and textile works, The Purple Shall Govern (2013). The striking figure at […]
Two years ago while passing through Chueca in Madrid, my partner and I stopped by the little gallery Mad is Mad, on Calle Pelayo, where there has always been something to admire in the shop window. Mad is Mad sponsors quirky, out-of-the way art by emerging artists. It was June 2018. I was surprised and […]
The mysterious and enigmatic artist Madge Gill (1882-1961) defied all expectations of being a working class woman in the early 20th century. Hidden away at home, she produced a seemingly endless wealth of unique artwork almost entirely away from the public eye. Gill had no formal training, she produced the work on her own terms […]
