Adejoke Tugbiyele (b.1977, New York, USA) is an award-winning, queer, black artist. Her work often comments on human rights issues around the world, and her own identity as a queer woman of Nigerian descent. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York where she continues to make artwork and engage in advocacy projects.
… Adejoke Tugbiyele’s Hybrid Forms and Second-Skins
LJ Roberts (b.1980) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and is known for large-scale textile installations, intricate embroideries, artist books, collages and sculpture. Their work investigates the overlaps of queer and trans politics, alternative kinships, narrative, and material deviance. Daniel Fountain speaks to LJ here about the relationships between craft, identity and queer theory, and how this manifests itself in their practice.
… LJ Roberts’ Queer Epics
Our spotlight this month is the emerging mixed-media artist Osgood (Oz) Bender who uses craft and material processes as a foundation to explore concepts of body modification.
… Spotlight: Oz Bender’s Deconstructive Craft
We often automatically refer to an artist’s collection as their ‘body of art’. The physical, bodily processes of crafting go (often literally) hand in hand with artistic creation. These bodily acts can often be therapeutic – we might think of the rhythmic practice of weaving or the soothing feeling of stepping away from screens, quietening our minds as we manually manipulate materials. Craft can impact the body, the physical act of making leaving its mark on the maker, such as the quiet ache of a spine that has been bent over a loom, fingers pricked by needles, skin chapped and cracked from handling clay. This issue feels out the myriad ways in which bodies relate to craft. It reaches into the crevices between creative practice, form and crafting and traces boundaries between interior and exterior. Through exploring a diverse range of embodied craft practices, it considers the corporeal aspects of crafting, of how bodies participate, labour, and speak back in the act of making.
In a poetic response to artist Alexi Marshall’s ‘The Party’, writer Jess Payn considers how bodies inhabit group spaces and impact on their environments; Bodies sometimes behave differently in crowds, partaking in murmurations of movement, performance, dance, or a jumbled jostle on a busy street – they are repeatedly made and unmade by their environments. Payn’s piece draws out the carnivalesque elements of ‘The Party’, exploring the ways intimacy’s dual promise of intimacy and threat of violence is foregrounded in this scene of communion and cluttered limbs. Making and performing are revealed as inherently embodied, collective acts through which we process the world around us.
From the way bodies work in social gatherings or intimate encounters, to the ways in which bodies work in capitalist systems – artist Johanna Unzueta states that ‘[h]ands are tools for me’ and her current exhibition, Tools for Life at Modern Art Oxford, unpicks the intrinsic relationship between the body and processes of labour, practice and industry. Cecilia Rosser’s exhibition review reflects on how the industrial is humanised, what craftsmanship means for the individual working body, and how the labour practices craft the labouring body within Unzueta’s body of work.
Sofia Carreira Wham reviews ‘Threading Forms’, an exhibition curated by Candida Stevens. This exhibition saw live demonstrations of weavers, live machine and hand stitching demonstrations, showing how bodies participate in making, the labour, concentration and rhythm of crafting, stitching and weaving. Whether it’s the politics of labour, or the fundamental human right of freedom of choice over what happens to your body; the body is a political space. Artist Giacinta Frisillo presents ‘the feminine mistake’, reflecting on healthcare and the right to inhabit and have control over one’s own body in a contorted American system that still, forty-seven years after the landmark Roe v. Wade case, is a relentless battle for freedom of choice and power.
The body is in constant conversation with the world around it. Violetta Liszka works with wire sculptures, photography and poetry to explore the boundaries between human interiority and the exterior forces that shape emotional and bodily experience in her project ‘Je est un autre’. Xuan Ma’s jewellery work also plays with the boundaries of the body, offering playful and intimate glimpses of ‘private views’ of the body. Using geometric shapes and reflective, mirrored surfaces, body parts are shown within the jewellery pieces to highlight these beautiful abstractions.
Embodied processes of making are at the heart of Enam Gbewonyo’s practice, which opens up a space to both critique racist capitalist discourse and enact processes of healing and renewal. Ahead of Gbewonyo’s performance ‘The Unbinding: a Restorative Act in Two Halves’ – which takes place on 15th April at Two Temple Place as part of the ‘Unbound: Visionary Women Collecting Textiles’ exhibition – we take a closer look at the work of this exciting up and coming textile and performance artist.
Human and non human bodies come together in ethical collective acts of making in the work of Tomas Saraceno, currently on display at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and reviewed for this issue by Jade French; the tiny webbed worlds that are spun by spiders reflect the interconnected natural and man-made structures that our bodies are bound up in, systems and processes that feel increasingly fragile at this moment in time. Saraceno’s work reminds us of not only of our common humanity, but also of our interdependence with the non human and the natural world – as French’s review highlights, ‘the woven patterns that we mimic in craft and making practices are a homage to the biological patterns we pass by and through’.
We hope you enjoy this collection, reflecting on the physicality of crafting, the work our bodies do, and the power to move and be moved that they hold.
‘I grew up working with my hands’, recalls Johanna Unzueta. ‘My mum always said I learned to weave and knit before I learned to read and write. Hands are tools for me and I can’t disconnect that.’
… Exhibition Review: Tools for Life – Johanna Unzueta
Inspired by Arthur Rimbaud’s famous quote, ‘Je est un autre’, which translates to mean ‘I am another’, Violetta Liszka’s project harnesses wire sculpture, photography and poetry to explore the boundaries between human interiority and the exterior forces that shape emotional and bodily experience.
Stained body. A body that was cut, bruised, complicated.
Fluid and mobile.
Trying to keep head in the air so I could breathe.
Forming itself to the shape of the container that traps it.
I was contained water.
My spirit, like oil cut into water.
Disconnected.
Yearning for connection
And wholeness.
Violetta Liszka was born in Krakow, Poland. Working first as a physiotherapist before embarking on a BA (Hons) and MA in Photography at the University of Brighton, pursuing interests in art and Judaism. Liszka has had art exhibits in London, Brighton, Southhampton, Berlin, Toronto, New York and Krakow, and is currently pursuing an MA in Jewish History and Culture at the University of Southhampton.
In the United States’ poor excuse for a health care system, a ‘pre-existing condition‘ is a medical condition that began before a person’s health coverage went into effect. Before the Affordable Care Act (ACA), colloquially known as Obamacare, was passed into law in 2014, insurance companies were often legally allowed to deny coverage to those with a pre- existing condition – that is to say, those who most needed health insurance in order to afford treatment and prescriptions. As the conservative branch of our government regularly works to break down the tenets of the ACA, the fate of those who most need treatment remains to be seen.
Amongst those most in need of affordable, reliable, and accessible healthcare are women. The list of women’s reproductive health concerns, as published by the Center for Disease Control (CDC), is lengthy, but many are preventable, treatable, or curable, when healthcare is provided. Clinics, such as the contentious Planned Parenthood, have been able to offer no- and low-cost treatment, care, and counselling to patients. However, as they also provide family planning services and abortion, they are under attack by (mostly) white, cis, male conservative lawmakers who are working diligently to retract its federal funding and close facilities. In 2019, nearly 50 years after President Nixon signed Title X into law, guaranteeing affordable birth control and reproductive health care to women with low income and stating that ‘no American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition,’ we are still fighting to retain these rights. Forty-seven years after the landmark Roe v. Wade decision to nationally legalize abortion, that right is in danger of being reneged. In 26 states – to put this in perspective, more than half of the US – women who choose abortion are currently required to undergo ultrasounds and, in 3, are obligated, rather horrifically, to listen to the foetal heartbeat while looking at the image on screen.
As our right to sane, affordable, and comprehensive healthcare, or lack thereof, seems to be the zeitgeist of all times in the US, feminist artists have long dealt with the subject. Most notably for me, the artist collective Sister Serpents comes to mind, having been birthed as a direct response to the 1989 United States Supreme Court decision allowing for states to withhold public funds to run facilities and hire employees to perform, assist with, or counsel women on abortions. But, as the 1980s now seem ancient history, it’s shocking that art on this subject is anything more than a dated remembrance of the dark ages. Instead, it’s revitalized in all forms. Margaret Atwood has released The Testaments, the sequel to her dystopian and frighteningly possible story, The Handmaid’s Tale this year because, as she put it, ‘for a while we thought we were moving away from [the book]. And then we turned around and started going back toward it’.
Since the Trump administration took office, I think women have felt the need to band together in protest for protection and support. I have come across many feminist communal arts projects and collectives doing just that. The Exquisite Uterus Project is a notable and ongoing example. The art piece is meant to ‘articulate [the] outrage at recent increased restrictions to women’s full access to good sexual and reproductive health care and growing limitations on our ability to determine our own reproductive choices’. Participants in the project are ‘urged to have fun with it but to consider how our ability to take control of our own personal uterus (and health care decisions) is a very serious and, now, political issue.’
While I find Fourth Wave Feminist activism, community, and art exciting, and contextualize much of my own art practice within it, I wish I didn’t find it necessary. As Catherine Morris, curator at the Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum said about an exhibition called A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism held shortly after the first – and most hopefully only – Trump election, ‘[w]e might have been thinking more about a celebration, and now we have a sense of urgency’. Sadly, and ironically, as this cause is already tired and storied, there is a sense of urgency to do something, to make art, to be heard and listened to. But haven’t we already tried this? Frankly, I’m tired of waging the same war so many generations before me have already fought. Why must I earn the freedom of choice and rights to the body I inhabit when the male gender is granted these rights at birth? Why do those, who are already imbued with rights to their own bodies, want rights to mine, as well?
As a woman, I am a pre-existing condition. Only I am not covered under the caveat in the ACA currently protecting those in need. And so, the fight continues.
Words: giacinta frisillo www.giacintafrisillo.com
January 2020 saw the second iteration of the London Art Fair’s Platform series, a dedicated exhibition within the Art Fair that highlights a craft process; following 2019’s spotlight on ceramics, the focus of this year’s Platform series was on textiles.
… Exhibition Review: Threading Forms, London Art Fair 2020
Witchcraft. Crafting is embedded in witchery, part of the practice of magic.
… Editorial #6 Witch/Craft
Xenobia Bailey’s career is as eclectic and colourful as the spiral crochet patterns that form a key part of her aesthetic. Having studied ethnomusicology at the University of Washington and Industrial Design at the Pratt Institute, she went on to work as a costume designer for Black Arts West and learnt to crochet at the Greenpoint Cultural society in Brooklyn. Her crochet hats infiltrated pop culture in the 1980s, appearing everywhere from United Colors of Beneton advertisements, and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, to Elle magazine.
… Spotlight: Xenobia Bailey’s Aesthetic of Funk
As I settled into my new routine, I began to explore the country, visiting Loch Lomond and the Hebrides, the Highlands and Orkney. While I felt such joy in each new place, I still had trouble connecting to the place-specific energy of the land. And so, I developed A Doorway In as a way to reflect upon my relation to this new place and also to experience more deeply the land around me.
… A Doorway In: My Own Way In
‘Home is no longer a dwelling but the untold story of a life being lived.’
John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
The praxis and history of craft is intimately intertwined with the domestic. Its domesticity is linked to the status it has long held as a devalued art form: craft is women’s work, a pastime or simply a way of creating decorative items that find their use in the home. Art belongs, we have been told, behind glass cases in galleries and institutions, whereas the products of craft live amongst us in the everyday, at home. However, the fact that the art world is beginning to take notice of craft and value it on its own terms raises questions about how craft enters the gallery space.
If home, as John Berger suggests, is the untold and unseen story of a life, craft weaves itself into this rich interior life of the domestic. Craft objects dwell in familiar everyday spaces. Their materiality records the experiences of our daily lives: the cracked piece of pottery, a frayed blanket, a snagged jumper, these all speak of our intimacy with the objects around us. It works to bring people together in a shared home or community; to think through the threads that connect us to our environment.
There is a long history of silence, untold stories, women and the domestic. Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1979) installation critiqued the patriarchal erasure of women’s place in the history of civilisation, through a process of domestic labour and craft. Nicole Horgan reviews Patricia Kaersenhout’s community art project Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner Too?, in which the artist expands on and challenges Chicago’s project by inviting 39 black women and women of colour across 2000 years of history to the dinner party. Biographies of women like Queen Amanirenas and activist Marsha P. Johnson are included among the translucent glassware and table runners (made at community ‘stitch-in’ events) at this ‘table of disruption’, offering a new perspective on the canon of art history. Alis Shea discusses Ghada Amer’s Private Rooms, highlighting the tendency to view Amer’s use of embroidery in relation to English sewing practices; in the process, she notes the historical Orientalist fascination with and appropriation of Eastern crafts. Private Rooms, Shea suggests, utilises the domestic craft of embroidery to ‘unite diverse experiences of oppression which occur in both Western and Eastern cultures’.
In this issue on craft and domesticity, motherhood inevitably emerges as a prominent theme. There can be a tedious and time-consuming element to domestic art, with its relentless rituals of washing, cooking, mending, and sweeping. Sarah Cameron reflects on how the crafting of a family home impacts on and speaks to artistic making: in sweepRANT, Cameron laments the ennui the everyday tasks of the domestic, but plays with its ritualistic and repetitive nature to create a poem that weaves together her roles of artist, mother, and homemaker. Cameron reflects on these roles in an accompanying essay, ‘Two Heads, Two Hearts, and the Mother Goddess’. The crossovers between domestic and creative labour and the labour of childbirth are picked up on in Alessandra Leruste’s review of Spilt Milk’s (a Scottish social enterprise that promotes the work of artists who are mothers) recent showcase Re: Birth. Exhibiting artist Laura Ajayi’s We Used to Be So Much Closer – a soft sculpture that evokes the umbilical cord, but which is made from lint collected out of her family’s tumble dryer – reminds us of the interconnected nature of these intimate forms of crafting, creating and making. In this month’s spotlight feature, artist Blandine Martin similarly dismantle narratives of quotidian objects to question and transform their relationship to the domestic. Handwoven tapestries from recycled materials, sand, timber take on a new form; their title – objet sans importance – seems to pose a question, asking us to reassess the roles these items play in our lives and our connections to them.
It is Hull-based artist Ella Dorton who blurs the lines between the gallery, the community, and the domestic with her striking fabric works. In a recent exhibition, she turned the Humber Street Gallery into a space that ‘you could relax, sit down and feel at home in’. Her domestic portraits draw parallels between the ‘worn-out-ness of the fabric’ and the ‘worn-out-ness of peoples’ homes and lives’, using the intimate setting of the interior to explore broader socio-political issues. In an interview with Lottie Whalen, she discusses making art that creates material and conceptual connections between the domestic and the global, situating personal narratives within the context of broader political crises.
The artists and makers in this issue each highlight craft’s potential to shatter cosy notions of domesticity, transforming the home into a site of subversion, activism, and resistance. Appealing to the senses, craft creates intimacy and draws our attention to the embodied experiences of modern life; it opens up a space where the stories of our daily lives collide with global narratives, foregrounding the interconnected nature of our domestic and public worlds.
There is a craft inclination in art that can put people at unease. It ebbs in popularity. Three years ago at an event at the ICA I was speaking to a sculptor who, when asked if they were still working on the same body of work, replied oh no, they only wrote now. It was one of several similar encounters I had, and whilst it can be common to move away from art after art school, we all seemed embarrassed that we had once been making. This idea was enforced by artists like Katrina Palmer, who moved from installation and sound sculpture, to published texts and plays. I’ve since been told in turning-point tones that Katrina Palmer is making objects again.
… Disruptive craft in contemporary art: ‘A quilt is an art object when it stands up like a man’
Seleena Laverne Daye‘s material of choice is felt. The fuzzy texture is the perfect fabric to bring their politically, pop culture driven work to life. As a self-taught artist, Daye creates personal narratives in her art and tackles topics relating to race, class, sexuality and gender. As the co-editor (alongside Em Ledger) of Poor Lass Zine, she has provided a platform for working class voices across eight issues with a podcast and live event in the works. We caught up with Daye to ask more about her projects, the importance of skill sharing, and the ways in which working class voices can be facilitated better in the arts…
… Interview: Seleena Laverne Daye on making zines & crafting change
Pinkie McClure is an artist using the allegorical power of medieval stained glass as a vehicle for contemporary expression. Stained glass was invented in the 12th century to communicate to a largely illiterate population, its vivid colours having a seductive quality that’s hard to resist. However, its narrative role has been largely abandoned in recent years, which is something she hopes to change by making work that reflects the world around us today.
My goal is to seduce the eye, but crucially, to deal with contemporary subject matter, telling darkly humorous stories from modern life. When I started work on ‘Beauty Tricks’ I wanted to make something beautiful. This led me to question interpretations of beauty and immediately a multitude of thorny contradictions popped up.
I decided to explore the way the beauty industry affects us and our environment. The central figure is based around a classic madonna, but she has liposuction lines on her torso and hypodermic needles and scalpels adorning her halo. Her nipples have been censored. Two little girls gaze up at her beautiful pink frock from a grey world of abandoned plastic containers. Above her, medieval scales traditionally used to symbolise the ‘weighing of souls’ refer to the long-running L’Oreal ad ‘worth it, not worth it’. A woman fires a gun at a mirror, smashing it to smithereens. To her left, a ‘kindly’ grandmother knits a web of Barbie dolls and to her right is a bulimic Rapunzel. The palm trees refer to the palm oil industry, the roses symbolise feminine beauty. At the top, Satan is hopping across the towers of Oxbridge with a pile of books heaped on his back, stealing all the knowledge while the women are distracted.
decoratingdissidence.com 