Radical Cross Stitch

Ever since I started cross stitching I always look at the world searching for square grids. Anything with a square grid can be a cross stitch canvas if you try hard enough.

So of course fences are the obvious ones. Fences have long been canvases, anything from your standard teenage boy territorial tagging through to actually using the fence as a piece of art.

So for ages I’ve been wanting to cross stitch a fence, and when we were up in Newcastle, we all got inspired.

We held this amazing workshop at the TINA Festival about craft, activism and storytelling. We talked about the history of craft and activism, we talked about the role of craft in feminist action and we talked about public acts of craftivism. And we got really psyched to go out and do some ourselves. So later that night a group of us headed down the street and got to work.

Now for some context. Those of you who’ve been to Newcastle recently might have noticed the insane amount of wasted space in Newcastle. The property speculators have gone absolutely mad hoarding land in the central city and it’s a virtual ghost town. The main street has about a 30% vacancy rate. There’s boarded up buildings everywhere. Yet they have a reasonable population of homeless people who can’t find anywhere to live, and the sprawl is madness.

So you gotta ask yourself what sort of government policy rewards landlords to sit on property and let it go to waste when young people can’t afford to find anywhere to rent, let alone buy their own home.

Earthsharing Australia has a campaign to visually demonstrate the true picture of the housing affordability crisis. Every time you hear the real estate lobby arguing for more land release on the fringes of cities, ask yourself what they’re doing with the land that’s already zoned residential, already has infrastructure and in heaps of cases already has a house on it!

So we decided to do a cross stitch about the I Want To Live Here Campaign to highlight to the people of Newcastle the madness that is going on in their own city.

The block we chose was about two blocks from city hall and had an old theatre on site which was been squatted by a number of people. There was enough land to probably build 15 houses with gardens or a whole stack of apartments. It had obviously been vacant for many years cause I found a ‘Vote Mark Latham for Prime Minister’ sign lying in the grass on the block.

The material we used was finger knitted wool. It was nice and bright, and strong, so it should last a while.

We sat on the side of the main road of Newcastle for a couple of hourse late on a Sunday night doing our knitting. It also happened to be the NRL Grand Final night (Newcastle lost) and the following day was a public holiday, so there were LOTS of drunk people around.

A number of them stopped to see what we were up to. Some were pretty polite and genuinely interested (although still very drunk), and some were just wankers. There was one guy who claimed to own the piece of land so I told him to put a community centre, community gardens and public housing on it. He didn’t seem terribly convinced…

We also met a couple of the people who were living in the building. One woman came out and told us her story which was really heart breakingly awful and it made me really sad that we live in a society that allows that amount of shit to happen to a human being without us all caring enough about her to stop it.

So at about 1am we finished up and headed home for some much needed sleep.

The next day we went down to take some pics.

This is a panorama I took which I cannot get to stitch up properly so consider it to be the edited highlights if you were walking past… You can click on it to see it bigger if you want.

This is a shot of it taken from the side so you can see all the text.

This is an upclose of the cross stitch. You can see we pulled the wool pretty tight. That’s so it would use less wool and also to make it a bit stronger so it should last longer.

One of our wonderful crew also cross stitched this heart. Coz we love everyone.

Hopefully that inspires some of you out there to do some fence cross stitching. I’ve done a bit more since then, more pics to follow!