Behind the Scenes: The Sleepers Quilt

This September, The Women’s Art Collection opens a new exhibition: The Sleepers. Exploring the politics of rest, the collection brings together a century of works across a variety of mediums: paintings, prints and textiles. At the heart of the exhibition is a collaborative quilt, created with women from the Cambridge Women’s Resource Centre and artist Cait Moreton-Lisle, which stitches together themes of rest, resistance, and care. Below, we go behind the scenes of quiltmaking with assistant curator Laura Moseley (who also champions craft as the founder of Common Threads Press) to talk about how the quilt is both a physical symbol of comfort and a platform for collective creativity…

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FeaturedArticle Issue Fourteen

Family, Community, and Inheritance in the Quilt-Making of Gee’s Bend

With a population today of just 275 people, Gee’s Bend is a small, isolated hamlet with a complex history. Surrounded on three sides by the Alabama river, it was once a cotton plantation, originally established by Joseph Gee and then later owned by Mark Pettway. As direct descendants of the slaves and subsequent sharecroppers who worked on the land throughout the 19th and 20th Century, the majority of those who live in Gee’s Bend continue to share the Pettway name.^[1]

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Article issue eight Practice Based queer craft

Practice-Based: Quilting the Lesbian Archive, Sarah-Joy Ford

I stand in cold stacks. My hands run over the pale green boxes scored with pencil marks. I rummage. A syllabus, a letter and tangled endings. An under-stairs cupboard filled with pornography. S&M dyke night flyers with tea in the living room. Email trails: reaching out, and toward something…

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Article Interviews issue eight

LJ Roberts’ Queer Epics

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.

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