Article 6

Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

Dijanne Cevaal

About my work

This project is very close to my heart. I feel so much that human rights have been impinged on by greed and corporate interests, as well as self-interest; that the rights of refugees, women and children, homeless people have been pushed to the edge and they are dehumanised so we no longer care they do not have the same rights as others. 

I kept the embroidery very simple and worked in black (well, almost black) and white, because to me there is nothing clearer than Article 6. It involves the rights of all humans who have been marginalised through poverty, violence or sometimes simply bad luck. It involves being part of things that somehow create greater empathy and greater love for our fellow humans. If my stitching can add my voice to a more empathic world that embraces the dignity of every single human, then every single stitch in my piece is a mark of hope.

- Dijanne Cevaal

Dijanne Cevaal

About me

My work is informed by travels and reading and study over the years. My Master’s degree explored issues of immigration in the earliest traces of my family I could find, and how that impacted on a sense of place as exemplified by lace. It has also made me aware of the marginalisation of people and what it is to experience prejudice (though in a minor degree).

My heritage is Dutch, but to say it is just Dutch is not strictly true as I have been able to trace parts of the family back to the religious wars when Huguenots were forced to flee France in fear of their lives. They settled on a small isolated island in the southern part of what is now the Netherlands and lived quietly there, hidden away until the Watersnoodramp flood in 1953, when my father and mother moved to northern Holland and subsequently to Australia, where we began a whole new life.

Other blocks about Article 6