Have you heard about this amazing new project? “In a war someone has to die” is an amazing new collaborative embroidery project by Hanne Bang.

From Hanne:

A couple of years ago I happened to zap by a TV program, in which a journalist was interviewing a professional African soldier. To the soldier`s great disappointment he was out of work at the moment – because there was no war in his region.
The interviewer asked the soldier if he was afraid of dying, and the soldier said: “No I am not afraid of dying. Are you afraid of dying?” The interviewer answered: “Yes I am afraid of dying”. Then the soldier said, without any sentimentality: “In a war someone has to die”.
This little dialogue, and the words “In a war someone has to die”, returned to me over and over again. Of course I knew that in wars people die, but suddenly I saw the essence of war and the reality of it very clearly.
These words are the main element in the art project. I use this sentence – these harsh words – in a feminine expression, as handkerchiefs and embroidery are.

You can participate in this project by visiting the website or the facebook page. I can’t wait to see the finished result!

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How’s your autumn/spring going? It’s all brrrrrrrrr here in Melbourne! But the leaves are just divine on my street so it makes it all worthwhile. Almost..

I’d like to take a moment to invite you to a really interesting forum that I’ll be speaking at next week.  There’s a great line up of speakers so it’ll be a very interesting night with some rigorous debate. Hope to see you there!

Arena Project Space asks the question – where do art and politics meet?
It is our pleasure to invite you to the Arena Project Space arts program launch and fundraising event on

Tuesday 17 May, 6 pm,
2 Kerr Street Fitzroy (between Nicholson and Brunswick streets).

Arena Project Space is a new exhibition and forum space, which has grown out of the work of Arena Publications, a broad left political and cultural project that has been running for over 30 years in Melbourne.

This space aims to widen Arena’s critical sphere and to facilitate and create dialogue about political and cultural interpretation through arts practice. Arena Project Space has the potential to provide a focus for politics as a context for creative practice. In an age of managerialism, it offers a space beyond the business plan for alternative world views

To launch the arts program planned for this space, the Arena Project Space arts board is organising a forum to consider the relation between art and politics today.

Forum participants are Simon Cooper, Rayna Fahey, Lyndal Jones, Robert Nelson and Tom Nicholson. The session will be chaired by Kevin Murray.

Speakers will give a brief response to the questions:
How might artists respond to the social transformations occurring today?
Can artists take on a political agenda without compromising their creativity?

Bookings are NOT required. Entry will be $5 at the door. Refreshments will be available.

We look forward to seeing you on 17 May at 6pm!

Zoe Hatten and Jessie Boylan (coordinators)
For further information: 9416 0232 or 0437 960 510, or go to .

Simon Cooper teaches cultural theory at Monash University and is an Arena Publications editor and author of the ‘Cooper’s Last’ column in Arena Magazine. He is a regular commentator on cultural issues on radio.

Rayna Fahey is editor of radicalcrossstitch.com, and co-founding producer of the Melbourne Craft Cartel.

Lyndal Jones is an artist with an interest in context, place and empowerment, involving performance and video installation. Her ‘Avoca Project’ addresses climate change action from the perspective of a small country town.

Kevin Murray is a writer and curator with an interest in south-south dialogue. He is convenor of Southern Perspectives and on-line editor of the Journal of Modern Craft He is an adjunct professor at RMIT, where he coordinates the Ethical Design Laboratory.

Robert Nelson discusses cultural values in education at Monash University and is the Age art critic. His most recent book is The VIsual Language of Painting: An Aesthetic Analysis of Representational Painting.

Tom Nicholson is an artist who lives in Melbourne and teaches Drawing at Monash University. One of his recent collaborative projects was Camp Pell Lecture, with Tony Birch. He is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery.

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And the award for the most fun sounding craftivist project of the year award goes to…

To celebrate the 70th birthday of John Lennon, the Craftivist Collective, a bunch of rad types over in England have organised a brilliant creative venture to get you thinking and talking about what global peace and justice means and would actually look like. Participants have been invited to create an embroidered quilt piece which will become part of a giant peace protest duvet. Radical and cosy, doesn’t get much better.

World peace sometimes sounds a bit cliché. In these days of greater global awareness and communication about the worlds ills, sometimes I reckon we make things just a bit too complicated and get a bit niche in our focus on issues. I know it certainly helps me in my activism to stop and take a breather every now and then and remember the big picture. Certainly thinking about vision and imagining how we want the world to be, rather than just focussing on what’s wrong with it is a very useful process to help avoid the ol’ activist burnout.

You can check out all the details here and sign up here to get involved.

Sadly, I’m going to have to give this one a miss. One of my best ways to keep me focussed and motivated on making the world a better place is hanging out with my kids. The last few months have been pretty madcap and I’m quickly realising my babies aren’t going to be babies much longer. So I’m downing tools project-wise for a couple of months to hang out in the sun in the garden.

But you have no excuse, get stitching.

peace

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At long last I got around to making a new Kiva loan! (check out my other loans here).  And I’m pretty excited about this one!  It had been getting hard to find actual makers to lend to, but recently there seems to have been an influx so this time it was pretty easy.  But I was extra happy to find a maker who is making traditional craft for local use.

Señora Teresa is dedicated to the sale of jewelry on credit in the zone of Pampahasi. She has performed this activity for three years. She is very well known in the area and the orders that she fills are for craft jewelry for ladies who wear the traditional clothing, since they use large jewels for their hats, the fastening on their cloaks, rings and large earrings. She has some complete sets of jewels that are very pretty and expensive, all bathed in gold. She buys the jewels and later sells them in her jewelry shop.
…
The loan will be invested in the purchase of rings and earrings, since she has orders for a festival that is held each year in the zone of Pampahasi. The jewels are used traditionally for the dances of the Morenada or Dances of the Dark, which is a folkloric Bolivian dance where the dancers disguise themselves in black adorned with prominent characteristics and the celebrants use these jewels for adorning their hats and to fasten their cloaks. Señora Teresa this very grateful to Emprender and Kiva for the confidence shown her in granting the loan.

Sounds like an amazing festival, I’d love to go check it out sometime!

My loan was counted towards the Etsy.com Handmade lending team, which is starting to make a bit of impression in the Kiva community.  We now have 94 members and over $6000 in loans.  Still a way to go to catch up to the Athiest Team that has over $2million in loans!  Any Etsy peeps out there wanna join us and help top the 100 member mark?

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Since I last made a loan the Etsy Lending Team has got more active and there’s a number of regular lenders boosting up our lending numbers.  We’ve just hit $4000 in loans!  Are you an etsy seller and a kiva lender?  Come join the team

My latest loan was a little hard to find.  I’ve noticed there’s a lot less makers on  Kiva and a definite increase in people selling cheap mass produced products.  This makes me quite sad to be honest.  I thought Kiva was about reducing the need for sweatshop economies..

Regardless, I did find the Morales family in Barranquilla, Colombia.  They make and sell a range of things to help their family prosper including hand made shoes, jewelry and clothing.

So give them a wave people, and wish them luck!

And for those of you out there still looking for last minute christmas ideas, consider a kiva gift voucher!  It’s a great last minute gift idea and the recipient gets to chose the person(s) to lend to.  Go on, make a difference!

Happy festive season everyone and see you in the next decade.

xox

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It took me quite a while to gather up the confidence to have a go. It’s all new and scary, you see. But I finally had a project I really wanted to do so I hitched up my pants and leapt in.

I was armed with the awesome tutorial by Pip which I wholeheartedly recommend checking out. Even if you’re not planning on doing the fabric thing and printing on paper with actual gocco paint, this tutorial is super helpful. I definitely used Pip’s tutorial alongside the official instructions and it made heaps more sense with both.

So I’ve now made TWO different screens and made a heap of patches.

The first lot were made as some pretty banners for vacant blocks of land.  We’ve attached ribbons on the corners so they can be tied on to fences.  I thought this was a good first project since the prints don’t need to be perfect and we can’t be too attached to them since they’ll probably get taken down.

Here’s a bunch drying.

And here’s a couple in action!  The first one was in St Kilda and the second was on Malvern Road somewhere

FUN!  Part of my little creative contributions to the realestate4ransom.com campaign highlighting the stupid waste of land we’ve got going on round the place.

The next project I did was in honour of Buy Nothing Day 09 and also as my wee action towards Copenhagen.  Being seven and a half months pregnant does preclude a fair amount of activism so I took the creative option!

I got the idea after a cool chat with an awesome Friends of the Earth volunteer at the Green New Deal conference.  Sorry I can’t remember your name! Hope you see these and like   When I get around to sewing up some more I’ll send some to the FoE shop.  I decided to border some of them with small black satin ribbon, just to make them a bit glam.  I also decided I very much like printing on calico.  It seems to pick up the ink best and it looks nice too.

Printing on fabric with Gocco is a little bit hard and takes a bit of perseverance.  I’d very much like to try it with someone else doing some of them!

What is really easy though is printing on paper!

Last weekend I went to the open studio for the super cool Gemma Jones.  The open studios were part of the Big West Festival – which was also super cool!  Can’t wait til the next one! (I should also write about that – especially the knitted bridge installation – but I reckon it won’t happen so go check out the other cool crafty stuff on their website).

Gemma gave a couple of demos on how to use a Gocco and we all got to have a go.  It was MOST FUN.  I picked up some new prints for my wee girls new room so the walls are quickly filling up with rad art.

Those prints were done on an old sex guide book.  Some of the pages were hilarious!  My favourite was ‘what to say in bed – and when not to laugh’.  Genius.

So now I’ve gotten over ‘the fear’ I’m psyched to do more!

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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

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And she did a wonderful job!!

You can buy the pattern in the Radical Rags etsy store.  And it’s only $5!

It’s one of my favourite quotes, especially as an ex Wellington resident!

This pattern is perfect if you’ve never cross stitched before and want something easy to start with.  Or if you’re a pro stitcher and want a quick project!

All proceeds from sales of this pattern between now and the end of the month will go to my awesome mate Alex and her outback fundraising adventure!  Go Alex!

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Got this awesome email from Sean McFarlane who is studying design in Edinburgh (the Scottish one).

“I am currently in the middle/final throes of my final year design project & I am focusing on politically motivated design.  One of the pieces I have designed & created is a cross stitch highlighting the issue of Israeli occupation in Palestine & the demolition of Palestinian homes.”

Sean also sent this nice WiP shot which I really like.  I do love artists that share their process!

And of course I am especially impressed with the clever interpretation of such a classic design.  I think the world needs a lot more subversions of the home sweet home!

Check out the Curious Cat for more about Sean and his work.

Free Palestine

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I had a super awesome time with the stall.  Not really ’cause I sold heaps of stuff but it was a great opportunity to meet some customers face to face.  And nice to sell some things I’ve had for a while.  And some new things!  Like my police tape wallet I made last week.  Sold it to this nice young lad who’d been feeling real guilty about buying a $1.50 wallet obviously made in a sweatshop, especially since it started falling apart real quick.  Not only did I help him with a new wallet made out of Victoria Police TRASH (naughty litter bugs) but I showed him how to easily repair it if it starts to show signs of wear.  I’m thinking I’ll make a couple more of these and put them online for sale.

What was most fun for me running this stall was having the opportunity to talk to people about the sustainability issues around textile production.  It seems that with an increasing environmental awareness there’s plenty of people who know they should be conscious of water, energy, fuel, and paper consumption but there is little awareness about the massive waste that’s occuring with textiles.

What I found was that people understand that they should be aware of the materials that new clothes are made of.  There’s a good awareness of the environmental impacts of cotton growing and the benefits of wearing bamboo and hemp.  But not many people realised that most of the environmental impacts of cotton production isn’t the growing of the cotton (although that is definitely a big issue!) but also in the processes of turning cotton from raw material into cloth, especially coloured cloth!

And that’s just the production of material.

What really concern me is the massively ineficient use of fabric in our society.  So many clothes are being worn only a handful of times and then literally ending up in a landfill.  It surprised many people to realise that only about 8% of clothes donated for charity actually get resold.  Most of it is shredded for things like filling furniture.  But a fair heap of it is too dirty and torn or whatever and ends up being turfed.

We need to be so much smarter with our use of fabric.  We need to start by buying better quality clothes that are made from good quality sustainable fabrics and made to withstand a fair wear.  We need to learn to repair the clothes we have so they last longer.  We need to think of other uses for our clothes when we’re finished using them.  We need to ensure we donate all wearable clothes in a nice and clean condition to our op shops so they can be sold again.

Because at the moment tons and tons and tons of clothes end up like this every year:

And that creates more of a need for the toxic sweatshop slums spreading throughout the developing world

Does that make you sick?  I sure hope so.

So after plenty of conversations to fire me up, I really enjoyed presenting the workshop ‘The Fabric of Resistance’ which was about radical craft history, both contemporary and historical.  And looking into the ethics of contemporary craft which really dealt with some of the issues around sustainability and production.

We had an awesome session and were super lucky to have it in a beautiful hand made Mongolian Gur.  Which I sadly didn’t get a picture of but I’m tracking one down to put up here.  Thanks to everyone who came and made the workshop really successful.  And for those who didn’t, here’s the slideshow:

Yes, another world IS possible!

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