My visual art practice is primarily focussed on the deployment of traditional craft forms including knitting, sewing, textiles and photo-media in contemporary art works that question histories of female and queer representation through the lens of subjective experience. Past works have included knitted figures, large text sculptures, abstracted forms and collections of knitted skins, tools and armours. Specific to my practice is the use of knitting as an engaging sculptural medium, a poetic or political tool.
I began knitting in the year 2000 after the tragic loss of my brother. In a moment of grief, my mother sat beside me and taught me to knit. In that moment, I understood knitting to be a powerful personal tool for narrating stories and creating new bonds. My knitted art works have always been autobiographical. Early sculptures included a knitted effigy of my father as a policeman, a 'family' tree, and a giant boundary hedge that spells LOVE. Through these time intensive works which took up to a year to create, I explored my childhood experiences and memories of gender and family.
In later elaborate knitted sculptures, I became more focussed on crafting feminist representations of the body. I reinterpreted diverse mythical and historical representations of women to reflect my own experiences of grief, sexual awakening, and my desire to be a mother. Then as part of a practice led PhD in sculpture, I spent many years on a series of knitted skins and armours that explore the evocative and connective character of skin and its relevance to expressions of female embodiment and subjectivity. The solitude of the PhD sparked a series of socially engaged projects. For my KNIT HOPE, KNIT SAFE and FURIES works, I worked with diverse groups of people in the community to create knitted banners and photographic images that challenge the ongoing issue of violence against women.
Since 2015, I have created knitted pictures and textile works that further explore the politics and power of the body. The Feminist Fan series features knitted replicas of famous portraits or artworks featuring feminist artists from around the globe including Sarah Lucas, Pussy Riot, Guerrilla Girls, Cindy Sherman, Lynda Benglis, Juliana Huxtable, Mithu Sen, Tracey Moffatt, Yoko Ono, Hannah Wilke and more. The title Feminist Fan emphasizes my reverence to these artists and feminism, and each carefully stitched picture, featuring over 10,000 stitches and 80 hours work, constitutes a time-intensive act of devotion. As a collection, Feminist Fan forms an intimate family portrait of feminism and of my own influences, in which threads of connection between artists across time periods and cultures emerge.
Clothes Portraits continued my interest in portraits of artists through explorations with their cast off clothes. Each hand and machine sewn hanging textile work portrays an artist for whom textiles and clothing form an important part of their work or self-expression. Constructed from donated collections of each artist’s well-worn clothes, the portraits refer to clothing as a social fabric that bears the memories, experiences and identity of each wearer over time. Picturing mostly women or queer people through their clothes, the works also consider the political significance of fashion in asserting a bodily presence, power or comfort in the world and in one’s skin.
Anonymous Was A Woman is a two year-long knitting performance in which I repetitively knitted one hundred and forty panels bearing the text ‘Anonymous Was A Woman’ at home, at work and in public spaces. The project draws attention to the continued erasure of female artists from the canon of art history, but also speaks to ongoing issues of gender inequality faced by women around the world including unequal pay, undervalued domestic and care labour and continued threats of violence and sexual assault. Running counter to the solo labour in Anonymous Was A Woman project, the @covid19quilt - a digital quilt project I initiated on Instagram with collaborator Tal Fitzpatrick - invites communities of makers around the world to record their experience of the COVID-19 pandemic through craft.
My interest in feminist and intersectional politics and the power of craft to translate social change has continued with my body of work PROTEST SIGNS. These intensively produced works comprise a series of hand knitted tightly cropped pictures of protesters holding signs, and a series of large scale knitted protest signs stretched around wooden boards and mounted on sticks. Each picture or sign forms a knitted homage to a real image of a protest I have collected online, or from news media, social media, family or friends. This suite of knitted protest signs addresses a broad range of urgent social and political issues of our time including feminism, sexual harassment and or assault, reproductive freedom, LGBTQIA pride and discrimination, racism, sexism, transphobia, ecological crisis and protest as a means for social change. The intimate and time intensive translation of these hand-made signs into brightly coloured knitted pictures simultaneously invites the viewer into a closer tactile engagement with the image and the message. This body of work forms a meditation on the power of protest and words and considers the potential we all have to change the world with our own two hands.
Self Care Actions arises from my lived experience as a queer feminist who is an artist/teacher/advocate/activist and parent, who works toward social change. Consisting of a series of brightly coloured, hand-knitted panels bearing self care prompts, the work explores the radical roots of self care and formulates actions to sustain and care for oneself – in difficult times.
Between making these works that have a local and global feminist focus, I have undertaken many artist residencies in Barcelona, Krems, London, New Delhi, Beijing, Tokyo, Sydney, Melbourne and New York where I have made curatorial, collaborative and individual projects that draw threads of connection between my own experience and feminist histories of the places I visit.
In every project and with every stitch, I consider how far feminism has come and how far we still have to go.