RADICALCROSSSTITCH

SITE: Digital Embroidered Commons at Sculpture Now!?!

Righto! Who’s up for a stitch-a-long?

Radical Cross Stitch is teaming up with Public Assembly to create a contribution to the Digital Embroidered Commons project that’s being facilitated by the amazing Ele Carpenter. We will be stitching the term SITE and we want you to help!

We’re creating an installation piece as part of the Sculpture Now!?! exhibition at the Yarra Sculpture Gallery and we are creating a craft room inside the gallery for the purposes of stitching the term together.  And we’d love you to join us.

We will be in the gallery for three making sessions.  Each session complete with cups of tea, baked goods and of course, radical discussion.

“SITE: Location, both as in the fact of being somewhere, and also, as in the answer to the question of “where”, that “somewhere” is. Hence, situation.”

Step into our craft room, make yourself a cuppa and pick up a needle.  All welcome, no experience necessary. Join us as we embrace the radical political and artistic spirit of centuries of craft circles to unpick the big issues of the day.

xxxxx

Public sessions:
Friday 27th August 5-8pm (open session – this is the official opening of the show so will be a tad busy..)
Thursday 2nd September 1-4 (limited spaces, RSVP kids welcome)
Sunday 5th September 1-4 (limited spaces, RSVP kids welcome)

The installation is viewable as a snapshot of a work in progress at all other times

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Sculpture Now!?! will deliver a snapshot of the current thematic and conceptual influences that inform contemporary sculptural practice in Australia. The artists range from emerging to established with an emphasis on innovation and experimentation. The exhibition aspires to shed some light on the myriad of diverse trajectories in which sculptural practice is heading.

Other artists participating: Stelarc, Hannah Bertram, Rod McRae, Karleena Mitchell, Petra Svoboda, Junky Projects, Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Linelle Septo, Lucie Hallenstein

Catching up

I haven’t posted in a while, but that doesn’t mean I’ve not been crafting. So i thought I should do a roundup of what I’ve been doing.

Let’s start with the most recent finished project: I’ve seen a few blueprint embroideries around (the first was this beautiful rendering of a Frank Lloyd Wright blueprint by Craftster member muddlepud), and wanted to make one of my own. And what would fit a textile nerd better than a part of a Jacquard loom?

I’ve also made a new cross stitch, based on one of a quote from Mythbuster’s Adam Savage. Free pattern here!

And some of the other things I’ve been up to: apart from stitching I’ve been screenprinting, knitting and sewing. Both printing and sewing are techniques i haven’t worked a lot with in a while, so I’m trying to find my way back to them. I’m also trying to get out of my comfort zone by trying new crafts: I’ve signed up to a carpentry class that starts in september (and which I’m looking forward to so much). Hopefully it’ll be inspiring and lead to lots of new ideas.

Making it Handmade: More Melbourne Screenings!

As promised, there are going to be some more screenings of the fantastic locally made doco Making it Handmade.  So those of you who missed out at MIFF, or did see it and want to see it again, should quickly grab your tickets before they sell out again – and they’re selling quick!  Even better this screening is also going to have a craft market! If you’re a maker and want to be part of the market, check out the submission details.

Tons of people have been asking about where it can be seen elsewhere and rest assured there are plans afoot!  Your best bet is to go like the Facebook Page to keep in the loop.

This screening is a total DIY gig and we’re asking the fabulous Melbourne craft community to help us spread the word about the screening.  Please RSVP to the event here and invite your friends!

Yay!

Pretty girl or riot nerd?

About a year ago I worked for one of the biggest sites on the interwebz which targets a demographic group of kids between nine and seventeen years, handling their costumer support for a couple of weeks. What I thought would be a mind numbing 9-5 job to pay the rent between semesters at Uni, turned out to be a really thrilling and interesting insight into youth culture today. After a year spent writing academic essays on cultural studies, mostly about subculture and its connection to feminism and DIY, I realised that this was a gold mine for anyone interested in girl culture.

The site caters to the idolising, fame seeking, and brand loving youngster and most of the users are girls, from all over the world. It is a mix between a game based around paper dolls and a social community where the users can chat, communicate in groups and discuss their favourite clothing brands, pop icons or basically anything. The paper doll part consists of, on the one hand, pre-made dolls and clothes based on real celebrities ranging from Miley Cyrus and Britney Spears to Kurt Cobain and Joan of Arc, and on the other your own “Me doll”, your alter ego or avatar on the site which you can make up to look exactly as you want when it comes so size, skin colour, eyes, clothes, make up, hair style and so on (as long as you keep within the socially acceptable frames that limits your choices – for example when it comes to body shape/size). It is free to sign up for an ordinary account, but to get the good stuff – buying the nicest outfits, participate in the best competitions or getting your little paws on the coolest eyeliner – you have to pay for a monthly membership and also use your parents Visa card to buy the artificial currency that is used on the site. It is basically the girl version of World of Warcraft, but instead of pretending to be a druid that uses magical positions to kill monsters you buy cute tops, shiny handbags and pretty scarves from Donna Karen.

What I find interesting about this is the subject position these girls claim for themselves in a milieu that is so connected to the female stereotype of body managing, appearance, keeping busy with making yourself up as a woman/girl, instead of using your energy to fight these stereotypes and demands. Stuff that little girls like – ponies, glitter make up, pretty dresses, boy bands, and playing dress up – are seen as cute, unimportant, commercialised and utterly harmless to society. Or as Polly Styrene, the grandmother of punk, puts it; “some people think little girls should be seen, not heard”. Being a girl is not something to be really proud of; the negative connotations of running, screaming or crying like a girl is not just expressions without meaning, they actually say something about the way we regard girls. Also, girl culture is often looked upon from a sort of “non-culture” angle; that it is just looks, an image or fad that young girls adopt one week and discard the next in favour of something new and hip. This in contrast to boy culture, or proper subculture, who is seen as lived culture where age, gender and staying true to the scene are important factors that make up cool.

I myself had (and still have) my doubts and critical thoughts about this kind of gendered, commercial marketing, targeting kids and dragging them into the consumer culture lifestyle. But spending my days answering questions from the sites users and dealing with abuse reports from its community, I discovered something that I hadn’t thought of earlier. It was what I like to call the seedy underbelly of girls, the scheming, lying, bribing, name calling, stealing, hoaxing and cheating that is raging on the site. All the things that good girls don’t do. And all this in a hyper commercialised environment, centred around looks, clothes, accessories, fame, pop culture and branding.

There are young girls coming together, creating a space and culture of their own within a pre-packaged environment, turning it into a arena of pre-teen queens forming secret gangs and cliques, using their html skills to set up mirror sites for stealing passwords, making up new personas, lying, cheating and essentially not being nice. In an odd sort of way, I found this very liberating and, well… fun. Of course I realise that little girls calling each other stuff like “you stupid crack whore” and stealing money from others isn’t a good thing. But I like the fact that this shows that they are agents in their own life, they’re not pretty dolls that just play dress up and sit quiet in a corner. Coming from a teen hood where I myself found feminism through the angry screams of the riot grrrls, a punk phenomena reclaiming the girl as something powerful, good, subversive and bursting with rage, I wish that a society that’s started to regard boy nerd culture (like WoW) as proof of creative modern youth culture, could do the same here. I think that’s what I’m trying to mirror in this cross stitch – the mash up of cuteness, cuddly cats and pastel colours together with a “I don’t owe you anything” attitude that creates its own rules and at the same time, on some level, re-thinks the whole concept of being girly.

Of course I got the quote from a Bikini Kill song.

Making it Handmade

I’m sorry folks, I’ve not really been quite up with the play with the blogging thing recently.  But I’m trying to get better I promise! One really super important thing that I let slip was the fact that I’M IN A FILM! And so is Casey, and Gemma and Pip! And even better, Anna made it (mostly) all by herself!

Making it Handmade is a documentary about:

A seditious and subversive subculture is gaining momentum in Melbourne. But rather than wielding megaphones and placards, they’re cross-stitching slogans on hurricane wire and constructing plush female genitalia from craft supplies.

Following four local women who’ve taken a seemingly staid past-time and injected it with a youthful, modern aesthetic, filmmaker Anna Brownfield shows a side of craft more closely aligned with punk DIY culture than with Martha Stewart and ‘home sweet home’ tapestries.

“I wanted to show that craft was no longer daggy but had moved into a new era and was being reclaimed by women who had been brought up as feminists.” – filmmaker Anna Brownfield

And it’s AWESOME!  Making it Handmade just had its premiere screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival and was insanely popular.  There was only one screening and it was one of the first to sell out.  And there was so many people sad they missed out.  But don’t fret, there are more screenings being planned as I type.  There’s also plans afoot to take the film to other centres so those of you in far off places can see the awesomeness too.

After the screening there was a short panel with Anna, Casey, Pip, Gemma and myself and there was some nice interesting questions asked.  I’ve had some amazing feedback from people since the screening. Friends have told me they had their horizons shifted once again and strangers have got in touch with overwhelming levels of inspiration bubbling out of them!

So were you there? What did you think? What was your favourite bit? My favourite bit was watching all the happy people making stuff and seeing my now three and a half year old looking little and cute as a one year old!  It was exciting for her too.  It was the first time Tara had ever been to the movies and she was in it! Not many kids can say THAT.

For more information and to keep up with future screening news check out Anna’s blog http://www.annabrownfield.blogspot.com I’ll try let you know too. But yeah, bit slack on the blogging..

xox