Article 11

Hayley Mills-Styles

website@moadoph.gov.au — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 02:46:38 +0000

Hayley Mills-Styles website@moadop… Mon, 10/15/2018 - 13:46

Hayley Mills-Styles is an artist and educator specialising in textiles. She has worked within the field of arts and mental health with organisations like Arts & Minds Network and HOOT Creative Arts.

Hayley is an advocate for creative provision as a form of recovery. She has personal experience of mental health issues and was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder in 2017. Through her own work she has explored the themes of depression.

Through projects led by The Craftivist Collective, Hayley has found a way to raise awareness of social and political issues that affect marginalised people.

Hayley Mills-Styles

English

England, United Kingdom

English

I never thought of myself as politically aware when I was growing up in a small village in the north of England. I would watch the local and national news, but never really saw how events affected me.

During my Master’s degree, I started to research craftivism. I was drawn to how I could use my voice and chosen medium, textiles, to promote change. I soon began making mini protest banners and teaching craftivist workshops, encouraging people to speak out through stitch.

I discovered this project through social media. Now, more than ever, I feel that people who don’t fit into the accepted categories society has created are being marginalised by outdated terminology.

When I first moved to the city, I lived near Her Majesty’s Prison (HMP) Leeds, a prominent part of the city’s landscape. I wanted to include this on my block, alongside a map of the area.

UDHR Article

Article 11

Quilt

Red quilt

Hilo Magico

website@moadoph.gov.au — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 04:35:52 +0000

Hilo Magico website@moadop… Mon, 10/15/2018 - 15:35

Norma (Hilo Magico) is a former communications executive from Mexico City. She is the mother of a girl and, after maternity, she started a project that fuses two of her passions: meditating and embroidery. For her, the repetition and the rhythm of embroidering is a meditation itself. She learnt to embroider from her mother, and her mother from her mother. She also identifies with the thousands of indigenous women in Mexico who have been knitting and embroidering for hundreds of years using weaving tied to a tree. Norma sees this as a heritage to women today, weaving their lives, learning to slow down and be more present.

Hilo Magico

English, Spanish

Mexico

Mexican

My piece shows hands being free from chains, exploding in flowers and feathers, representing victory over injustice. I like using natural fibres because I think they keep the energy of the image represented. For this piece I used cotton.

I would like people to see and feel faith and positivity, knowing that justice exists and you should never lose hope. Mexico, my beloved country, has suffered from bad government even before I was born, but for the last 10 years things have turned horrifying. The number of deaths is alarming: journalists, activists, civilians and even children—without forgetting, of course, the situation of our immigrants at the US border.

I would like to make this piece in the loving memory of all the victims and all the mothers that didn’t recover their sons or daughters, and also as a picture of how I see us coming out of this: victorious.

UDHR Article

Article 11

Quilt

Green quilt

Caren Garfen

website@moadoph.gov.au — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 05:26:31 +0000

Caren Garfen website@moadop… Mon, 10/15/2018 - 16:26

Caren Garfen specialises in textiles and painstaking hand-stitch, creating carefully considered pieces with profound messages. Her interest is in gender politics and women’s issues, mainly focusing on social pressures and dieting in the 21st century. She creates one-off artworks, commissions, site-specific pieces and installations, and has worked on group projects with other artists. Her wryly humorous and sharply observed hand-sewn messages are the result of extensive research and intuitive observation. Caren has established an international reputation for her accessible yet challenging issue-based art. Her work has been exhibited widely in the United Kingdom and Europe, as well as in Japan, the United States and Canada.

Over the past four years Caren has gathered research from a variety of sources, including three international conferences, to utilise in her current artworks, which focus on eating disorders and their debilitating effects on young people. Caren has also examined various forms of social media to uncover The Secret Life of an Eating Disorder. She created Tweets (Not Sweets), using anonymous tweets and hashtags that specifically deal with the sufferers’ illness. The anonymity echoes the secrecy of this mental and physical disorder. Another artwork, Identity Crisis, was inspired by a confidential conversation with an anorexic schoolgirl. Experiences have been recorded and hand-sewn onto specially constructed hospital wristbands. They decrease in size sequentially to highlight the progression of her illness.

Caren also created Hard Act to Swallow focusing on the media attention given to celebrities with eating disorders. This hand-stitched piece displays forenames of famous people inside hand-sewn pharmaceutical tablets. Whilst the viewer can identify some of the represented celebrities, many names could possibly refer to themselves or others. In fact, whilst exhibiting this work at one of the conferences, an attendee talked about her sister who has an eating disorder and whose first name could be found on the piece. The deeper subtext of this seemingly simple piece corresponds with the complexity of the illness. Once this body of work has been completed, it will be exhibited in the form of an art installation.

When Caren was commissioned to make a contemporary quilt for the prestigious V&A Museum’s acclaimed Quilts 1700–2010 exhibition in London (her one and only bedcover!) she never thought that she would become involved in the #UDHRquilt Project and is delighted to have contributed to collaborative art activism.

Caren Garfen

English

England, United Kingdom

British

The United Kingdom’s justice system is respected as a fair judge of criminal activity, but sometimes innocent people spend stretches of time in prison. I have carried out thorough research and collated the names of men and women who have been imprisoned in British jails but have eventually had their sentences quashed.

An original, second-hand blue-and-white striped prison shirt was procured, its label with the words ‘HM PRISON’ still attached. The garment came with an ink stain, utilised as a reminder that innocent people can be left with ‘a stain on their character’. I have deconstructed the shirt to make the patch, and have reattached the labels, buttons and buttonholes.

Names and the number of years spent incarcerated have been hand-stitched along the stripes to form the bars of a prison cell. All of those named were imprisoned after 10 December 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted.

UDHR Article

Article 11

Quilt

Blue quilt

Shelly Georgopulos

website@moadoph.gov.au — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 05:48:13 +0000

Shelly Georgopulos website@moadop… Mon, 10/15/2018 - 16:48

Shelly Georgopulos is an American fibre artist who works from her studio in the Philadelphia suburbs. She learned to love embroidery as a child while stitching with her grandmother and aunt. Drawing inspiration from the world around her, Shelly’s style is as varied as her interests, with one commonality: meticulous attention to detail.

Inspired to use fibre art as a voice in this divisive time in media, politics and history, Shelly attempts to mix social activism with stitching tips on her website and social media accounts. She’s partnered with other artists to organise and promote online auctions such as #DeedsAndActions and #ArtistsAgainstInjustice. In these two craftivism efforts, hundreds of artists joined together to raise more than $10,000 for victims of gun violence and for refugees and asylum seekers.

Today Shelly can be found hiking with her kids, organising new voter registration drives and sharing her passion for needlework.

Discover more at www.shellysellslemonade.com and www.instagram.com/shelly_sells_lemonade

Shelly Georgopulos

English

United States of America

American, of Polish, Ukrainian and British descent

I thought about the court of public opinion in America, the political climate and the way the new President was condemning entire groups of people. His campaign platform was built on fear-mongering. His racist rhetoric, his executive orders and the uptick in hate crimes committed by his base struck me as a clear violation of the right to presumed innocence.

I created a juxtaposition of innocent people and the man who violates their rights in words and actions. I wanted to represent them wrapped in the protective text of Article 11, with the President spouting vitriol and condemnation from the fringe.

To create the block, I cut up a linen shirt belonging to a family member who supports the US President. The image of the President is stitched on white cotton and accented with watercolour pencils. His hair is embroidered intentionally using a stitch called ‘turkey work’.

UDHR Article

Article 11

Quilt

Yellow quilt