Help Uncle Kev
Ok folks. Put your hands in your pockets. Uncle Kevin Buzzacott (Aboriginal Elder/Activist) needs money for a big operation soon. You can donate by buying his track “Rok Hop”. He needs your money quick, so dig deep folks and follow the link. You can donate as much as you want.
You can also buy one of my cross stitch patterns from the Radical Rags shop. 100% of proceeds between now and the end of Jan straight to Uncle Kev.
Uncle Kev is one of the most inspiring, endearing, radical and deadly funny elders in the movement to protect country. The irony that a man who’s spent so many decades fighting uranium mining is now needing treatment for cancer is not lost on any of us. Please give back to a man who has given so much.
Radelaide
Further to the rad things in the last post is this awesome new group that’s just popped out of Adelaide. So if you live in the crazy hot city – check out Radical Craft Adelaide.
They’ve been holding some crafternoons. Next one is on Dec 12 for those who want to stitch and bitch radically. It’s gold coin and funds go to ActNow Theatre for Social Change. Bring along your current project or they’ve got cross stitch kits on hand for a few dollars. RSVP and check out all the details on Facebook.
Fence Stitch Tutorial
THE RADICAL CROSS STITCH GUIDE TO FENCE STITCHING
In collaboration with the realestate4ransom prankster campaign against the rampant land speculation plaguing Melbourne’s suburbs, Radical Cross Stitch and the Melbourne Revolutionary Craft Circle invite you to engage in a small piece of community beautification. This post is all about the how – make sure you read all about the why before you begin.
The following document contains full instructions on how to cross stitch a dollar sign on your favourite local block of vacant land.
Materials:
x Red wool – can be obtained from your local op shop, your own craft stash or raid someone else’s
x Time
x A fence with either diamond or square grid on a block of vacant land
x A friend or two – ‘cause these things are always more fun with mates
Part A: Finger Knitting
Step 1: Tie your wool in a loose loop around your index finger
Step 2: Swing knot around to the back of your index finger then loosely loop wool round your middle finger.
Step 3: Bring wool round the back of your hand and from left to right, wrap over the front of your fingers above the existing loops.
Step 4: Take hold of original loop on your index finger and pull it over the second loop and over your finger and release. You’ll need to bend your finger down to get it over easily. The first one might be a bit tight if your original loop wasn’t loose enough. Don’t worry this is normal and won’t happen on the rest of them.
Step 5: Repeat step 4 for the loop on your middle finger. Will look like this when finished.
Step 6: Take hold of loose wool and wrap around your hand counter clockwise, ensuring the new wool sits above the old wool looped on your fingers.
Step 7: Repeat steps 4-6
Step 8: After about 7-10 rounds a ‘snake’ of knitted wool will be forming behind your hand. Pull on this snake to lengthen and tighten it.
And that’s it!
Now time to keep knitting. You’ll need about 10 metres for this project. Once you have about 5 metres of knitted wool, cut the wool and tie it round your finger knitting to knot it. Don’t worry about this looking too attractive; it’ll get chopped off during the fence stitching process.
Part B: Fence Stitching
Now these photos aren’t as sexy due to the whole night time installation aspect of this kind of thing. Turns out my camera doesn’t like taking close shots of bright red wool at night with a flash… But you’ll get the drift.
This tutorial is based on a stitch done on a diamond shaped chain link fence. If you’ve struck gold and found a square grid fence, the directions will be slightly different. I’ve italicised the extra bits.
Step 1: Figure out where you’re going to start. You want your stitching to be nicely centred. Don’t rush this process! Count it a couple of times if you need to. Make sure your design has enough room without running into the edge of the fence, or into a broken bit of fence.
Step 2: Tie the end of your wool onto the fence onto the left corner of the diamond or bottom left corner of the square. Don’t worry about the hanging end bit of wool, you can tidy these all off at the end. But ensure it’s tightly secured so it doesn’t come off!
Step 3: pull your wool straight across the diamond and through the next diamond. Pass the wool behind and down to the diamond below. Gee that’s kinda hard to explain – look at the picture! For square grids you’ll go diagonally up and then down.
Step 4: pull the wool vertically (or diagonally) up, through and behind to the next diamond. In the picture my next diamond was the one up and to the left from my first.
There’s your first cross!
Now a brief pause to talk about tension. It’s really important to keep all your stitches tight! Firstly because it looks better, secondly because it lasts longer and finally and most importantly because it uses less wool! All that time finger knitting – best to use it efficiently! I usually stop every couple of stitches and give everything another tug to make sure it’s nice and tight.
Step 5: repeat steps 3 & 4 for the rest of your pattern. Once you get the hang of it you can start to get a bit clever about using the ‘thread’ to secure the behind work a bit neater as you go along. You want to keep the behind work as close to the stitches or the wire as possible so it keeps it neater and makes your finished design really clear. There’s no clear way to explain how to do this because it all depends on what direction you’re going in. It’s something you pick up with practice. So the more fence stitching you do the better!
Step 6: When you’ve finished the pattern, tie your wool off as tight as you can. As with your original knot, make sure it’s super secure.
Step 7: Cut off the extra wool. Make sure you leave a couple of centimetres spare just so the wool has a little bit to move before coming undone. Remember your stitching has to brave the elements so it will all move a bit over time.
Step 8: Step back and admire!!
Congratulations you just made one ugly mofo fence, heaps less ugly. And if you’ve used this pattern – you’ve also helped educate your community that this wasted block of land that appears to be just collecting weeds and rubbish is also helping line the pockets of some fat cat speculator. These blocks don’t just sit there doing nothing – they sit there making money!
The Pattern!
While of course you can use this tutorial to make whatever pattern you want – there’s no such thing as a bad fence stitch! – this tutorial has been put together to encourage to get on board with our campaign to highlight the vacant land in our suburbs. Land that is sitting there being ugly when it could be a lovely home – or a nice local business.
Here’s the two dollar sign patterns. One for a square grid (these are the easiest to do – but the fences are rarer) and one for the diamond grid.
They’re not the best quality image for the diagonal fence sorry… Will work on getting a better one, but it should do the trick for now.
And that’s it!
I’ve also made a pretty pdf version (8MB) of this doc which is easiest for printing if you prefer.
Very much looking forward to seeing what people can do with this tutorial. As a special treat, if you send me pics of your finished dollar sign and let me know your postal address I’ll send you one of our limited edition gocco printed speculator cum rags!
So get out there kids. There are literally hundreds of canvases across our suburbs to decorate! If you need help finding one maybe check out the invest page on the realestate4ransom.com site for some ideas.
xox
stitching a new economics
Those of you who’ve been following this site for a while will know that one of the biggest issues that concerns me is the stifling effects of land speculation on our communities and our creativity. While many of us crafty types would love to make stuff full time, it’s just not possible when we need to work so many hours a week to pay the rent/mortgage. It’s bloody frustrating that our economic system rewards those that just buy and sell for a living yet punishes those of us who actually create.
One of big current issues in the craft world has been the ripping off of the ideas and designs of independent crafters/illustrators etc. It seems like a weekly occurrence that some big company has found the work of a designer online and stolen it for their own products. And who has the legal budget to fight that kind of crap?
Whilst this might seem like a new phenomenon, the practise of capitalising off the creative talents of artistic communities has been around for a long time. And the most damaging application of this practise occurs in the land markets. While we’re out busting our bums creating vibrant awesome and sustainable communities, behind the scenes is a secret, shady bunch of land sharks circling.
It’s called gentrification – and there’s a really good explanation of how it works on the I Want To Live Here film comp site.
It sucks that we bust our asses creating great places to live only to get priced out of the area by lazy land hoarders cashing in on the value our hard work creates.
I think it’s super important for creative people to understand because it’s pretty common to see creative responses to the aesthetic issues of land banking – but rare to see these responses address the real drivers behind the issues. I’ve been seeing more and more projects emerging that are designed to make boarded up buildings attractive or to ‘help’ landlords find creative people to move in. But while the intentions behind these projects are very positive and genuine, they do all have the long term effect of making the land more valuable, thus compounding the problem. What’s needed are creative ideas to try and break the cycles and systems that create the problem of high rents and vacant buildings in the first place.
But of course the first step is understanding.
I always say that an important role of the artist in society is to act as a mirror of society – so we can see what we’re really up to, and to help create the visions of the way things could be. Inspiring and creating change is something artists and crafters are really good at – and have been doing for centuries.
So I was super proud to be asked to be part of a team of local creatives keen to get together and create a visual campaign around the effects of rampant land speculation in Melbourne. It currently takes 9.5 years of full time average wage to buy an average house in Melbourne (it was 4 years when the subprime crisis hit the US). This is absolutely insane! Yet still our media and politicians continue to perpetuate the myth that forever rising property prices are a good thing.
But who are they good for? Not young people, that’s for sure. How many of you young renters out there could ever imagine having the half a million bucks it takes to enter the market in Melbourne today? How many of us continue to buy the story that the First Home Owners Grant is about supporting young people. When in reality all the policy has done has further inflated prices above and beyond the original grants. First Home Owners Grant? Baby Boomers Bailout more like.
This stuff is so important for creative people to understand for two reasons. Firstly because it directly impacts on our lives in regards to the hours of our lives we waste working to pay for the roofs over our heads. And secondly because our own communities are guilty of perpetuating the same behaviour. I can’t count the number of craft and indie design markets I have seen this year alone with insanely high stall fees. There was one in particular I saw where the stall fees for a ‘fringe’ event alongside a major design event were higher than for the design event itself. And this is becoming more common.
We need to call bullshit on it.
The fact that there is a massive shift in awareness towards the important economic and environmental benefits of handmade stuff is freakin awesome. There are wonderful communities everywhere making and buying the things they need in life without destroying an ecosystem or exploiting another community in the process. We need to do what we can to support these systems and a big part of that is keeping a close eye on the marketplaces that support the trade in these products.
I have personal experience in running a market so I have an idea about how much these things cost – in both time and money. Our markets were run for the love of craft so we didn’t ever break even on costs but we really didn’t charge much for stalls. What was important for us was that our sellers had the freedom to make really out there stuff. Charging a high rent – which is what a stall fee is – would impact on that freedom, so we kept the fees low.
I know we could’ve charged a bit more. I’m sure our sellers would’ve forgiven us for wanting to at least cover costs. But if we had of charged that, and if we’d have hired a flasher venue and spent more on advertising etc there is NO WAY we would’ve been charging some of the stall fee levels I’ve seen recently.
I think it’s essential that if the craft movement in particular is going to have an analysis on issues of environmental impacts, multinational retail and workers rights we must also have a solid analysis of the politics of property – both physical and intellectual – since these areas have such massive impacts on our practice as crafters.
Enough ranting.
For this campaign we decided the main objective was to try and get young people to pay attention to the way land was being used in our suburbs. And to try and draw attention to who really drives the debates around these issues.
So presenting Melbourne’s latest real estate company: realestate4ransom.com Check the website and Facebook for more info on what it’s about and to see some of the images of the street part of the campaign. I’ll try and update some major bits here too.
But the main reason for this post is to get some of you undercover operatives in the Melbourne Revolutionary Craft Circle fired up to get out and do some craft! I’ve put together a tutorial on how to do a dollar sign on a fence. This post was supposed to be that tutorial but given the length of this post already I think I’ll do it separate..
So check out the website, fan us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Youtube (stay tuned for mad clip) and help us spread the word about what’s really going on.
Tutorial next!
xox
3..2..1.. Launch!
3CR’s Seeds of Dissent Calendar Launch
Everyone is welcome to come to the Calendar Launch on Friday, November 13 at Readings Bookshop in Carlton at 6pm for free wine and talk! [Readings is located at 309 Lygon St, Carlton, Victoria: Phone (03) 9347 6633.]
Face Up To The Future! with 3CR’s fifth Seeds Of Dissent Calendar. 3CR asked 12 artists who are part of Australian activist culture to contribute an artwork that reflects their idea of the future.
In 2006, 3CR created a Seeds of Dissent! Calendar to celebrate 3CR’s 30th birthday. The full colour, nationally distributed calendar teemed with radical dates, ideas and inspiration for social change. The calendar sold out of its 2000 copies. Since then 3CR’s Promotions Sub Committee’s Calendar Team has produced a yearly calendar, each with a fresh theme.
Face Up ToThe Future! — 3CR’s fifth Seeds Of Dissent Calendar — looks ahead to imagine a future we want to live in, while also celebrating Australia’s radical history. We asked 12 artists who are part of Australian activist culture to contribute an artwork that reflects their idea of the future. Some artists have created images that imagine the ideal future and some have chosen to depict issues we need to address today in order to achieve it.
Australian history re-envisioned with a cheeky female bushranger, uranium mining and the need to recognise the interdependence of ecology, the tyrannical expectations of female beauty, the return of tumbling as a form of transportation (!), Indigenous people at the heart of popular culture… these are the some of the issues explored by artists such as Arlene Texta Queen, Deborah Kelly, Bindi Cole, Adam Hill, Tom O’Hern, Mitch [? sorry Mitch], Jo Waite, Rayna Fahey (that would be me), Tom Civil, Mickie Quick, Lachlan Conn and Paul J Kalemba.
Cross-stitched samplers, stencils, felt pen drawings, collages, cartoons, illustration, computer art… these are the media the artists use to take us into the future of the 2010 Seeds of Dissent Calendar.
Also!
How to Make Trouble and Influence People
is a wonderful new book by some trouble-making bloke called Iain McIntyre, and is published by the redoubtable and not-at-all nervous Breakdown Press.
Launched in Newcastle at TINA it will be launched again, kicking and screaming, in Melbourne on THURSDAY the 5th NOVEMBER (remember, remember..) at the BELLA UNION BAR (Victorian Trades Hall, cnr Victoria and Lygon Streets) between the hours of 6 and 8pm.
The book compiles tales of unconventional political dissent included in three previously-published pamphlets — How To Make Trouble And Influence People (1996), How to Stop Whining and Start Living (1998) and Revenge Of The Troublemaker (2003) — and, as an EXTRA! ADDED! BONUS!, interviews with a number of pranksters, photos galore, and er, other stuff.
Thanks @ndy for the blog post which I just nicked and reposted here. There’s plenty of Radical Cross Stitch in BOTH these publications so make sure you get along to at least one of these great nights. And make sure you get your copy of the calendar! It does look fantastic. It’s a must have for your wall in 2010.
Barkly Street Addition
So a couple of weeks back I was travelling past the Barkly St fence and decided to jump off the bus to check out how the wool was weathering. And to my enourmously pleaseant surprise I discovered someone had added to it!
It’s not the best photo (I realised later) but it reads “I hear U’ stitched amongst the question marks! And it looked gorgeous!
Massive hellos and respect to the person who did it! Please get in touch xox
So in the weekend I headed back to get some better photos, only to discover someone had come along and cut it all off the fence. Not in any kind of nice way either, all the wool was left lying all over the ground. Hmpf.
So I cracked out some spray glue and stuck piles of it back to the top of the fence. Nowhere near as pretty. But better than it all sitting on the ground.
And still there’s no house there…
Some Interventions and an Opening
Last night saw the official launch of the Interventionist Guide to Melbourne cabinets in Platform Gallery, Flinders Subway, Melbourne. While there is a gallery space where you can go and see work, the true work is on the street, where each artist is spending the month of October encouraging and developing new ways of doing public art in Melbourne.
I have installed four pieces of work around the streets now and planning a fair few more. For those of you in Melbourne, put October 16-18 in your diary as the weekend where all the artists will be hitting the streets for performances, tours, installations and other creative bits and pieces.
Two of the four pieces have already been on here:
And here’s some pics of the latest couple.
You might recognise the last piece from here.
For this show us artists were asked to consider urban space: how it’s built, how we relate to it, how others relate to it. And for me it is very much about questions of ownership, access, power and control. My experiences of Melbourne’s CBD have been quite varied; as a worker, an activist, a resident, a mother, a pregnant woman, a public transport user, a cyclist, a pedestrian. None of those experiences have meant much control in the space so I’ve managed to experience quite varied forms of discrimination in that space.
I’m also very aware of the access issues other people face. Those in wheelchairs is a prime example. It’s hard enough getting around with a pram sometimes, but even harder with a wheel chair. You learn a whole different path of navigation around the city that able bodied people just don’t ever need to consider. Another example is the elderly. I do know people who live in Melbourne who haven’t visited the CBD in over a decade because it’s just too hard and intimidating. They prefer the relative safety of the suburbs where they can get everything they need without the (media driven) fear of the city space. And there’s of course other reasons, language especially.
This all means that there is a large amount of people who are simply excluded from that space, they are invisible.
I got wondering just how many other people thought about these issues and I figured probably not too many. Discrimination tends not to be something you think about until you experience it, and spatial experience is something that even those that experience it, aren’t necessarily aware of. The idea that our cities and buildings are designed by and for able-bodied white guys is such a given that considerations for other needs are rarely made.
I always find department stores pretty amazing in their design. If you stop and look at actually who uses a department store, women are by far the majority. Yet even their designs rarely accommodate their needs. If it’s a multi story building you will almost always find the baby wares department above or beyond ground level. So a woman with a pram is going to need to negotiate at least one floor change to get there. And given you aren’t supposed to use an escalator with a pram it can sometimes take longer to get to the department you want than to find the actual item you’re looking for once your there. And that’s if you can get through the aisles. It’s astonishing how many shops selling baby things I have been into with a pram that have aisles narrower than the average pram..
So a lot of the pieces I’m doing are talking about different peoples’ relationships with space. And also the stuff that moves through the space. Especially given a fair chunk of the urban space is dedicated to the peddling of stuff.
The piece above on the rubbish bin is one such piece. Very much geared towards encouraging people to consider how easily and flippantly we throw things away. Rather than focussing on whether you can recycle something or not, I’m more interested in people thinking about why they needed this throw away thing in the first place. It seems that so many people still believe that the solutions to climate change and the rampant abuse of our planet are decisions to be made by politicians and CEOs. While those people certainly have a role, the role of the consumer in changing their own behaviour is just as, if not more important. In a country with the highest per capita emissions in the world, we really need to start thinking about why we invest so much energy in making things just to have a short, uninteresting interaction with the thing and then throw it away. There’s got to more to life.
So these are just some of the issues that I think about when engaging with the urban fabric. And I am sure these are completely different to the issues the other artists consider. I urge you to visit the website and visit the gallery and check them all out.
And most importantly, I urge you to grab a map from the gallery and get out into the city and consider your own relationships with the spaces within and what opportunities you see for artistic practice and engagement. Then head back to the gallery and share your ideas with the rest of us!
And now for some pics of the opening. Thanks to all who came it was a great night!
Stitching some Urban Fabric
Spent today in the city doing some final preparations for the Interventionist Guide. Aside from the wind, it was one of the most fun days I have had in a very long time! I am SO looking forward to the show opening so the play can REALLY begin!
Put it in your diaries people! Friday October 2nd, 5pm, Platform Gallery, Flinders Subway, Melbourne.
Also, I look this pregnant now
Not one, but three (and a half..)
It’s been a bit quiet on the ol’ RCS blog as of late. Partly due to the never ending joys of pregnancy (promise not to bore you with the details..) but also partly due to the busyness of preparing for some upcoming exhibitions. And it’s about time our lovely readers got to hear the details!
Firstly, opening next week in Jönköpings, Sweden, is “Craftwerk 2.0: New Household Tactics for the Popular Crafts”.
Craftwerk 2.0 is an exhibition that explores the new “updated” textile crafts that are developed by a new generation of serious amateurs, innovative craftsmen, engaged entrepreneurs and political practitioners.
This is one of the biggest craft exhibitions on the calendar this year and the RCS crew is most excited to be a part of it! Both I and the Ninja have pieces in the show including ‘Oh Sorry, was that your land?’, ‘Homes for All’, Mario map, and an as yet unseen series of QR codes. There’s some really interesting events running with the show and I urge anyone anywhere near Sweden to put this show in your diary! The exhibition runs from September 19 until January 16 2010.
The next exhibition on the agenda is Explosive Expression, an Art Auction and Exhibition in commemoration of the second anniversary of the State Terror Raids in New Zealand of October 15th, 2007. For more info on the Exhibition and the Auction (online bids are welcome for those not able to be in Wellington) check out the website and the Facebook event.
I was most honoured to be asked to contribute to this show. As readers will probably know, I am friends with a number of the defendants so have paid close attention to the developments of the cases. But aside from that I am appalled at the massive amounts of money being spent by the NZ counter terrorism unit investigating activists. As the Greens warned when this legislation was first introduced, it’s about giving massive powers to Police which encroach on civil liberties. And they warned from day one, due to the complete lack of domestic terrorism the legislation would inevitably be used to monitor and stifle dissent.
Whether or not the defendants are found guilty on the charges they all face is quite irrelevant to the overall issue that the Police spent over $10million investigating, using intensely intrusive surveillance techniques, a significant proportion of the NZ activist community in the name of counter-terrorism. They executed warrants on homes across the country and literally terrorised entire communities and homes containing small children.
The small group of people now facing relatively minor charges in comparison to the hype created around the initial raids now have to face the ‘justice’ system and receive a fair trial. To do this they need massive contributions towards their defence. Not just to cover the legal costs but also the costs of travel for the defendants and their families every time they need to be in court.
I urge anyone out there with an interest in collecting art, particularly political art to check out the works on the website and consider making a bid. Especially those of you in countries with strong currencies! The NZ Dollar is buying about 70 US cents at the mo’ so money coming in from overseas will go further 
The piece I have contributed is called ‘Security Glam’ and is based on this image that came out of a collaboration between our friends at the Groundswell Collective and Artists at War
I will post an image of the completed piece once it’s on the Oct 15th Solidarity site.
Thirdly, I was asked a while back to participate in a Melbourne show (finally!!) and there was no way I was going to say no to this one! Curated by the super inspiring Lynda Roberts from Public Assembly, the Interventionist Guide to Melbourne is a group show of work by artists who focus their work in engaging with the urban fabric.
The show is both gallery and street based with the Platform Gallery being transformed into a virtual map of Melbourne revealing sites for individuals and groups to creatively and temporarily intervene within the existing urban fabric.
Each artist will contribute work in various mediums but each will be editing a zine guide as to how to go out and ‘do’ their form of intervention. The works will inspire members of the public to go out and do their own interventions which can be documented and will add to the show.
My work is very much focussed around challenging notions of space, particularly around issues of ownership, construction and access. I’ll be sharing the skills for three types of craft based intervention and am pleased to say none of it involves yarn bombing..
The opening is on October the 2nd at Platform (FB event here) and continues until the 30th. Contributing artists will also be out on the street on Oct 16-18 intervening! Keep an eye on the website for more details.
Finally – and this is the half – I’ve been working on a page for the 2010 3CR Calendar. It’s one of the major fundraising activities for Melbourne’s best grassroots community, activist radio station. And I was super honoured to be asked to contribute. So it’s not really an exhibition as such, but a group show appearing on a wall near you! I understand the calendar is about to go to the printers and I think the launch is in November some time. Will let you know details when I know them.
The piece I contributed is an antique inspired sampler with an anti-consumerist theme. Reckon you old skool cross stitchers out there will love it. I’m also going to release the pattern as a fundraiser for 3CR, it’ll be available in the Radical Rags store sometime later this year.
So I reckon there’s been about 80,000 or so stitches over the last few months which hopefully explains the lack of blog words! I’ll update this site over the next few weeks with more images and details as they come to hand.
Thanks for stopping in to make sure we’re still here
xox
MRCC gets more press!
The latest Melbourne Revolutionary Craft Circle action already got in the local paper. And to add to that I did an interview on 3CR’s fabulously awesome DIY Arts Show – which you can listen to online now.
AND today a story has appeared in The Vine about it.
Yay!