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!
RCS in the paper
After the latest action by the Melbourne Revolutionary Craft Circle in Footscray, one of the local papers, The Star, wrote a story about it. Including a lovely bad ass guerilla crafter pic!
What the…
Readers of Radical Cross Stitch will remember last year when the Melbourne Revolutionary Craft Circle got out in Footscray and stitched ‘I Wanna Live Here’ on the fence on the corner of Barkly St and Commercial Road. Here’s the award-winning short film by Anna Brownfield as a refresher
So almost a year on and some philistine (guessing the landlord..) cut it off! Clearly not happy with the community questioning the ongoing waste of such a precious resource the local landmark was destroyed.
The MRCC was clearly not going to let this go unresponded to. So a few days later we were out again, this time armed with bright green wool and tummies filled with Pho.
What the hell is going on?
Why is this block still empty?
Why are there 11 other vacant sites around the primary school?
Why does the State Government continue to believe the outright lies of the property industry that the housing crisis is driven by lack of land?
Why do we still allow this waste of our most precious resource when there’s over 100,000 people every night in Australia with no place to live, let alone call home?
We’ve had enough.
Badgeriffic
I’m getting super excited counting down to this years’ Melbourne Social Forum, which is on in just TWO WEEKS! If you’re never been to a social forum before, it’s kind of like a global economic summit but without the white guys in suits, massive military presence and counter-productive outcomes. The social forum movement arose as an alternative to the globalisation wave that was sweeping the planet at the end of the last millennium, based around the idea that ‘another world is possible’.
At social forums, grassroots activists who work in the fields of social, economic and environmental justice get together and update each other on campaigns, talk about their work and share skills and resources.
This Melbourne Social Forum there’s gonna be a pretty decent craft presence as the movement is really coming to grips with the idea that a big part of sustainability is making more of the things we use in our lives. The Craft Cartel is doing a workshop (details to come) about craftivism and some of the issues around the consumerisation of craft.
And of course, there’s gonna be a market at the social forum! There’s going to be heaps of different organisations with stalls so you can learn about all the campaigns going on and find out what you can do to support them. And there’s going to be a heap of local, handmade stuff on stalls. I borrowed a badge maker to make some more stuff to go on my stall and spent yesterday happily making mixed media badges. There’s some at the top of the post. Like? You better come to the Melbourne Social Forum!
Oh Sorry, was that your land?
At long last I can present a work I finished a while ago which has been sitting in the framing pile for far too long.
For a long time I have been astounded at the amount of finished handmade work that lies unwanted and unappreciated in our op shops. Mostly they are insanely undervalued. I recently visited a store that had a tapestry frame for sale (at higher price than brand new ones!) sitting alongside a finished tapestry. Take a guess at which had the higher price. Given that the people that normally work in op shops – especially of the charity variety – tend to be older women, you’d think there’d be a bit more appreciation for the time and effort gone into some of these pieces. But sadly not.
As part of my personal goal of using less new stuff, rather, using the stuff we have more efficiently. And as part of my goal to help raise the value of craft, in particular the not practically useful ones.. I have begun a series of stitch ‘hacks’.
Taking the political ideas behind hacktivism and the open source movement in particular to inform this series, the Tapysteria Hacks will take a previously discarded piece and give it a new, albeit political, life.
The piece above was titled ‘Snowgum’ and it’s a scene from Goulburn. I’d just been through that area when I found this one so I was particularly interested in it. Initially I had some more detailed ideas for it, but decided that I didn’t want to take away too much from the original work. I found this rolled up and stuffed under a pile of fabric in an op shop. I think it was about $3 or $4. The original work wasn’t done on a frame so it was quite stretched and distorted and took quite a lot of work to frame up – massive respect to Finer Art Services, the art framers in Seddon for the awesome work done on this, Heart! Heart!
This piece is for sale to raise funds for Lex Wotton’s support fund.
On Friday 24th October an all white jury found Lex Wotton, an Aboriginal man from Palm Island, Australia – a former prison island for Aboriginal People – guilty of ‘rioting with destruction’ for his involvement in the 2004 Palm Island uprising. On November 26th 2004 the people of Palm Island set fire to the local police station, court house and police barracks after a pathologist’s report claimed that the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee, a 36 year old local, in police custody a week earlier was an ‘accident’.
Mulrunji died in a police cell, one hour after he had been arrested for being drunk. He suffered massive internal injuries, including a ruptured spleen, four broken ribs and a ‘liver that had been ‘almost cleaved in two’ from a huge compressive force.’
The officer who arrested him, Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, claimed that Mulrunji had fallen on stairs. A coroner’s inquest found that Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley was responsible for Mulrunji’s death, as the injuries were consistent with a beating. However, a court found Hurley not guilty for manslaughter. He has since been promoted, rewarded, and is an Inspector on the Gold Coast.
In comparison Lex Wotton has now been sentenced to six years in prison with a non parole period of two years. Despite being a democratically elected leader of his community and spending the duration of the riots attempting to keep the situation peaceful, and even negotiating safe passage for Police off the island – an offer the Police rejected.
Proceeds from the sale of this piece will be donated to Lex Wotton’s support fund to assist paying legal bills and travel bills for his family to visit.
Please join the campaign to bring global awareness to this travesty of justice
QRacks in the Land
Just before Christmas I was approached and asked to participate in The Streets of Melbourne Festival. It’s the first time this Festival has been run and it’s been designed to showcase and celebrate street culture. Be it dance, performance, music or art. The Festival was run over three days in Federation Square in Melbourne.
I decided to use the opportunity to experiment with some ideas I’d been having about large scale cross stitch works.
Given that Federation Square is a privately run space, I was a bit limited in what I could do in terms of overt political statements. So I decided to go covert.
I’ve been working on stitching QR Codes for some time now. I’ve been doing them on regular Aida fabric (14 count mostly) and they’ve been working really well. So I decided to do it large scale. This project was stitched with black and white finger knitted wool and stitched on animal fencing (which is tough to work with but has a lovely strong and square grid).
QR Codes, or Quick Response Codes are an open source mobile phone read bar code type technology which originated from Japan (download the free reader here). While the Japanese tend to use QR codes for communicating public service information ie public transport timetables. The introduction of QR Codes to Australia has largely been based in advertising (ugh).
So I’ve been working QR Codes in cross stitch as a way of exploring non-corporate alternatives to this potentially very interesting and useful communication medium.
The piece designed for The Streets of Melbourne is designed to make a very clear statement on the irony of a privately owned and operated city square. A space that, within Western culture, has traditionally been the primary space for free speech. And of course this space in particular is part of the traditional gathering grounds for the people of the Kulin Nations.
It is to the Kulin Nations that this piece, QRacks in the Land, is dedicated.
A very special thanks to Emma for support in making this happen!
Supply Side Solutions – My Ass
I bet you been hearing a whole lotta talk from the housing/building/development industry recently about how the reason housing is so expensive is ’cause there’s not enough houses. And – my favourite excuse – that the industry hasn’t got enough land to build on.
The politicians, of course lap this up. Given that the majority of them aren’t actually trained classical economists, and a fair amount of them get some pretty nifty donations from the industry and a decent percentage probably make a reasonable income from property investment. It all makes sense to them.
And land rezoning is about the easiest thing a politician can do. It doesn’t require any legislation and they get a cool photo op with a spade and a pretty yellow sun hat.
UNFORTUNATELY this is all a bunch of bollocks.
Thanks to Tohm Curtis and his recently released report commissioned by Earthsharing Australia, we can now quite conclusively demonstrate that the issue isn’t supply it’s speculation.
Any idiot can tell you that if you have a resource and you want to make it more valuable, you don’t sell it all at once, you drip feed it into the market. That is exactly the issue facing our housing market. Far from the real estate industry’s advertised vacancy rate of 0.7% in inner Melbourne, the actual vacancy rate is 7%. To put that in real terms that’s 2,317 properties empty in central Melbourne during Australia’s worst ever housing crisis.
This speculative vacancy is what’s really driving the housing crisis.
So while there’s over 200 Melbourne University students without a home, there is enough housing vacant in Carlton alone to house every single one of them. And it’s their parents’ generation that is doing it to them.
At the start of last year there were 38,000 existing residentially zoned blocks of land vacant in Melbourne being help by the six big developers. This year Brumby gave a massive handout to the development industry and rezoned another 90,000 blocks of land for residential purposes.
NINETY THOUSAND
So has anyone noticed the price of land drop this year? Didn’t think so.
Of course the majority of that land was already owned by the developers so the rezoning made them overnight bajillionaires. And no, they won’t be building affordable housing, they’re building more suburban mcmansion ghettos which will be drip fed into the market to ensure they can charge the maximum amount for each and every one of those houses.
Our generation has come aboard the space ship of planet earth but all the seats are taken and we are left squeezing in the aisles.
The time has come to get real angry about this. Not angry and irrational, but angry and organised. Anyone keen to help out with creative action on this issue (and there are so many fun, beautiful things we can do!) should get in touch. We’ll be getting together in the new year to plan what to do.
Flock n Flog
Possibly the world’s first ever craft market as a form of direct action protest against land speculation. How could you miss it?