Green quilt

Sam Harlow-Black

website@moadoph.gov.au — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 03:36:45 +0000

Sam Harlow-Black website@moadop… Mon, 10/15/2018 - 14:36

Sam Harlow Black is a mother of four, and stepmother of three. As a craft-based textile artist from the northern suburbs of Melbourne, she has always been a fanatically creative person and self-taught painter, hand-spinner and crocheter from a young age. Through her studies in teaching, textile design and art therapy as well as lived experience, she has developed a strong practice in handmade textiles which include her own unique and quirky illustrative style. While raising her children, Sam educated herself in art history by reading and collecting books about artists who inspired her on her artistic journey. She looks to local artists, such as painter Mirka Mora and sculptor Deborah Halpern, as well as the work of international artists, such as Niki De Saint Phalle’s ‘Nanas’ and Louise Bourgeois’ textile sculptures, which inform her shapes, as well as Yayoi Kusama’s obsessive patterning, which inspires her highly patterned works. This style continues to be reinvented and explored whilst building her resume as an emerging artist.

Sam has developed her craft-based textile art practice through her studies in the Master of Arts (Art in Public space) program at RMIT, which she completed in June 2018. Through her research project, she investigated the uses of handmade craft as a tool for meaning-making, self-expression and performance in site-specific public art. As part of her research project, she produced and performed a ‘one woman show’ inspired by Yoko Ono including singing, self-composed slam poetry and craftivist artworks used as the set. She is currently teaching her quirky brand of woolly knitted art-making, making textile works and pursuing her interest in community-based art practice. Sam is artist-in-residence at Alternative Women’s Fitness, Thornbury, in her ‘art squat’ where she hopes to teach more low-budget expressive art workshops aimed at empowering and encouraging the mental health of women.

Sam Harlow-Black

English

Australia

Australian

Craftivism is something I’m passionate about. I’m also passionate about equality in all areas of public life. I used rainbow colours to express an underlying theme of diversity across the spectrum of society.

The colours celebrate the marriage equality law changes in Australia, which allow my partner and I to choose marriage if we wish. Putting my picture on my work shows that I, a proud Generation X citizen of Australia and member of the LGBTQI+ community, am willing to stand up to STOP discrimination against those who identify as non-binary genders. And we must work together to provide housing and dignity to the 100,000+ homeless Australians, a large proportion of whom are children and young people.

As the parent of an autistic child, I fight for my son’s right to dignity and equal participation in society. It is ‘the sisterhood’ who primarily care for vulnerable people. We need to STOP discriminating against those with disabilities.

UDHR Article

Article 1

Quilt

Green quilt

Sarah Joy-Ford

website@moadoph.gov.au — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 03:45:55 +0000

Sarah Joy-Ford website@moadop… Mon, 10/15/2018 - 14:45

Sarah-Joy Ford is an artist and curator currently based in Leeds, England. She has studied at the University of Leeds, Hungarian University of Fine Arts, School of the Damned and Manchester School of Art. She is co-director of SEIZE projects; an artist-led organisation programming events and exhibitions in the United Kingdom. Recent exhibitions include Queen, COLLAR (Manchester); Weaving Europe: the world as mediation, Shelley Residence (Paphos); SuperTonic, Copeland Gallery (London); and Wish You Were Here, Stryx Gallery (Birmingham). She is the curator of two funded projects: The Guild: contemporary textiles, Temple Works (Leeds); and Cut Cloth: contemporary textiles and feminism, The Portico Library (Manchester). Recent public commissions include collaborative projects for The Yorkshire Year of the Textiles and Processions: a hundred years of suffrage. She is the recipient of the AHRC North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership Award for her PhD studentship. Her new project, Hard Craft, in collaboration with Juliet Fleming, has been funded by Arts Council England and will take place throughout November 2018 at Vane Gallery, Newcastle, England.

Sarah Joy-Ford

English

England, United Kingdom

English

I work with embroidery, quilting and surface-pattern design to ask questions of Queer narratives, fictions, histories and identities. I stitched Article 2 because it declares human rights belong to everybody, without discrimination due to ‘race, colour … or other status’. I suppose sexuality is the ‘other status’.

I wanted to draw attention to the lack of human rights for LGBTQI+ people across the world. It is currently illegal to be gay in 72 countries. Same-sex marriage is legal in only 26 countries, and so few places have protections for LGBTQI+ people in terms of parenting, housing, employment or access to services.

We must challenge discrimination in all forms, everywhere. The United Kingdom (where I am from) cannot claim to be a safe haven for LGBTQI+ people without supporting asylum seekers and refugees who faced discrimination and hate crime in their home countries. Without global solidarity and support, there is no pride.

UDHR Article

Article 2

Quilt

Green quilt

Alexander Hernandez

website@moadoph.gov.au — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 03:58:41 +0000

Alexander Hernandez website@moadop… Mon, 10/15/2018 - 14:58

Alexander Hernandez is a first generation Mexican–American artist. He received his Bachelor of Fine Art (2007) in painting and drawing from Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in Denver, Colorado, and his Masters of Fine Art (2012) at California College of the Arts in San Francisco in studio art. His current work is mixed media with an emphasis on textiles.

Alexander Hernandez

Spanish, English

United States of America

Mexican

My preferred art materials at the moment are scrap fabrics, remnants of unfinished projects, personal belongings, found objects and traditional textiles. I sew, paint, embroider, layer and patch these mediums together using traditional needlework and DIY crafting techniques.

Recently I have been deconstructing Latino masculine tropes and iconography. I dissect these images into smaller pieces, then sew them back together creating larger, playful artworks. In these pieces I embrace ripped holes, unravelling threads, raw edges and slashes revealing layers of multiple identities: my Mexican heritage; Queer affinity; Rocky Mountain upbringing; gender role expectations; punk and crafty tendencies. Like patchwork, all these different identities come together creating something that is unique, fabulous and complicated.

UDHR Article

Article 3

Quilt

Green quilt

Jessica Wohl

website@moadoph.gov.au — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 04:00:51 +0000

Jessica Wohl website@moadop… Mon, 10/15/2018 - 15:00

Jessica Wohl received her Bachelor of Fine Art from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2001 and her Master of Fine Art from the University of Georgia in 2010.

Jessica’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Belfast Photo Festival, the Museum of Design Atlanta, the Robert Mann Gallery in New York and the Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville. Her work has also been exhibited at venues in Miami, New Orleans, Kansas City, England, Finland, Norway, Italy, Hong Kong and Korea, and has recently been featured in New American Paintings, Vogue, and ArtNews. Her work is in the collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Sprint-Nextel Corporation, the H&R Block World Headquarters, numerous private collectors and is included in the Drawing Center’s Viewing Program. She is participating in the Artist Residency in Motherhood, and is currently an Associate Professor of Art at the University of the South, where she teaches drawing and painting.

Jessica Wohl

English

United States of America

American

This block highlights the relationship between Article 4 and the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, which reads, ‘Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States’. The orange background recalls prison uniforms, and the white text on a police height chart calls to mind the link between imprisonment and slavery.

I am outraged by America’s skyrocketing mass incarceration. People can be imprisoned for years before being convicted. With white Americans predominantly in charge of the government and criminal justice system, and the vast majority of prisoners being people of colour, some may say the 13th Amendment’s loophole allows for a legal exchange of slavery for imprisonment. As a resident of Tennessee, where the Confederate flag still flies, I consider it on a daily basis. Article 4 is being violated, every day, millions of times over, in the United States.

UDHR Article

Article 4

Quilt

Green quilt

Joanna Barakat

website@moadoph.gov.au — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 04:03:34 +0000

Joanna Barakat website@moadop… Mon, 10/15/2018 - 15:03

Through various media and techniques, Joanna Barakat’s work is predominantly portraits that explore how we interpret and construct our identity. Interested in alternative forms of communication, she brings together elements of painting, photography, Palestinian embroidery and street art to challenge and question collective ideas and stereotypes using a reimagined contemporary Palestinian aesthetic. She moved to Los Angeles from Jerusalem when she was a year old, where she was raised until she moved to London for university. Her final project at Central Saint Martins, a film about the physical and psychological borders faced by the Palestinians living in Palestine, was played in London’s Institute of Contemporary Art. She also wrote her MA dissertation about Palestinian street art while at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is now living in Abu Dhabi where she has co-founded a community that focuses on teaching, promoting and preserving Palestinian embroidery.

Joanna Barakat

English

United Arab Emirates

Palestinian, born in Jerusalem

As a Palestinian whose family is forced to live outside our native land, it seems to me that the violation of Article 5 is a succinct summation of the Israeli occupation of Palestine since 1948. With over five million refugees displaced to this day, Palestinians face daily humiliation, dehumanisation, discrimination and abuse. There are restrictions on movement of people and goods due to checkpoints and the separation wall, demolition of homes and businesses, detention of children, and the unlawful arrests and imprisonment of civilians without charges or a fair trial. Israel is notorious for the inhumane conditions of their prisons, the extreme abuse of the prisoners and the torture methods used to extract information.

Freedoms of religion, press or speech are severely restricted and this has led to graffiti emerging as a key form of communication. In my piece, Article 5 is stencilled on the wall like graffiti and is surrounded by Palestinian embroidery motifs of stars, cypress trees and ‘the walls of Jerusalem’.

UDHR Article

Article 5

Quilt

Green quilt

The following statement by the craftivist includes contestable views about the status of Israel as a nation recognised by the United Nations and about freedom in Israel. It does not constitute comment by the Museum of Australian Democracy.

We publish it as part of our commitment, through this exhibition, to encourage conversation about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Dijanne Cevaal

website@moadoph.gov.au — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 04:07:55 +0000

Dijanne Cevaal website@moadop… Mon, 10/15/2018 - 15:07

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.

Dijanne Cevaal

English

Australia

Dutch

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.

UDHR Article

Article 6

Quilt

Green quilt

Elise McKenzie

website@moadoph.gov.au — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 04:14:59 +0000

Elise McKenzie website@moadop… Mon, 10/15/2018 - 15:14

I am an artist and arts therapist. I currently work as a counsellor with refugees and people seeking asylum, and I am confronted daily by the human rights violations that are occurring on our own doorstep, and the impact this has on people and families. I also have the privilege of witnessing people’s strength and resilience, and their ability to grow though experiencing great adversity.

Elise McKenzie

English

Australia

Australian

I joined the #UDHRquilt Project because I believe in social justice and human rights, and I was drawn to the opportunity to express the importance of these creatively. I especially liked that the medium of this project is one traditionally done by women; for me this represents the power and importance of women’s voices.

For my block I used a scrap of fabric given to me by my mother. I chose the floral pattern because I wanted to juxtapose the weight and importance of the Article over more gentle femininity. The stitched imagery signifies the importance of equality.

UDHR Article

Article 7

Quilt

Green quilt

Di Ellis

website@moadoph.gov.au — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 04:16:59 +0000

Di Ellis website@moadop… Mon, 10/15/2018 - 15:16

Di Ellis is a printmaker and hand-sewer. She received a Bachelor of Fine Art Printmaking (Honours) from RMIT, Melbourne, in 2008.

Her practice explores costume, identity, place and social position.

Clothing offers the luxury of transformation and with this, a corresponding set of assumptions and behaviours. Dress encompassing amulets, tattoos and scarification is often dictated by cultural nationalism, political alliance, class, gender, age and religious constraints and whether we dress in fluoro ‘high vis’ garments, the uniform of the tradie; lycra, the fabric of choice for the gym junkie and athlete; or shroud our bodies in religious garb, underneath we are all the same a fragile cocktail of DNA. Costume, like a chrysalis, provides metamorphosis giving us all the opportunity to sartorially transform.

My other craftivist projects include Bimblebox, the fight led by Jill Sampson to save birdlife from a Queensland coalmining catastrophe; the Overwintering Project, bringing attention to migratory shore birds, overseen by Kate Gorringe Smith; and two projects of solidarity run by Gali Weiss with women of Afghanistan.

Di Ellis

English

Australia

Australian

My father instilled social conscience in me and in my own small way, I like to contribute to the forces of good through collectives driving social and political change.

Being a conscious recycler, I chose fabric from a 1970’s Australian Family Circle magazine kit. I remember my mother bringing the magazine home as a change from the Women’s Weekly. It was dedicated wholly to the comforts of family life, and elevated homemaking to a status of importance in a time of bra-burning and equal rights for women. I was searching for cloth that spoke of my home, and I felt its history, synthetic fabric and muted colour talked of growing up in the bland ‘safe’ cocoon of 1970’s suburban Melbourne.

Epacris impressa, common heath in its pink form, is from my home state of Victoria. I see it often while out driving; it colours the roadside from autumn to spring and I know that, like gum trees, I would be sentimental for it if displaced.

UDHR Article

Article 8

Quilt

Green quilt

Lerato Motau

website@moadoph.gov.au — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 04:31:53 +0000

Lerato Motau website@moadop… Mon, 10/15/2018 - 15:31

I love the brightness of luminous tones; I refer to them as ‘mashangane colours’. Associations of bright colours as well as embroidery are related to Shangaan people, which is inherent in my own ancestry.

Some of my other works have been inspired by Vilakazi Street in Soweto, where I live. In one project, text was embroidered onto a 30-metre piece of purple and yellow ribbon, which reads like a narrative of Vilakazi Street, chaptering different points of interest along the street. Visitors were invited to embroider symbols, thus including the illiterate.

A long-term project has been the Friendship Skirts, which are personalised skirts made with the individual characteristics of many of my female friends in mind. These skirts have been shown on a documentary in Beijing, and later worn as part of a fashion show in Johannesburg. This project has grown—I have now been receiving requests from people to make skirts for them, and I recently received had a request from a male client for a Friendship Shirt.

Lerato Motau

Tswana

South Africa

Shangaan

Embroidery, and particularly the act of stitching, are important in my work. Each stitch is a symbolic journey.

UDHR Article

Article 9

Quilt

Green quilt

Nadine Jones

website@moadoph.gov.au — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 04:33:53 +0000

Nadine Jones website@moadop… Mon, 10/15/2018 - 15:33

Nadine Jones is currently an undergraduate at the University of the West of England, studying fine art. Nadine recently completed an Erasmus exchange at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where she further developed her interest in textile art and gender politics. She is interested in pushing the boundaries of contemporary textile art, from working with embroidery, hand-weaving and knitting into forms that express the experiences of the female body.

Nadine Jones

Welsh

Wales, United Kingdom

Welsh

I found this project an exciting opportunity to talk to other artists who use embroidery as a form of painting. I regularly use red tones in my work as it’s a very emotive language that symbolises blood. For this project, I used red thread for another reason: it is a traditional Welsh colour; the colour of the dragon on our flag. I also used yellow because this is the colour of our national flower, the daffodil, which blooms in its thousands in spring. I bought the cotton material in the Brecon Beacons of mid-Wales.

I sewed the Article in my home language, Welsh, because although I no longer live in Wales I still feel a huge connection to my homeland and the people who live there. Welsh is a beautiful old Celtic language that is slowly being used less and less in Wales. It’s important to keep the language known and used.

UDHR Article

Article 10

Quilt

Green quilt