RADICALCROSSSTITCH

Colouring in the city

If you went into the city in the weekend, it’s quite likely you saw something a tad unusual.  You may have seen a garden in a strange place, a performance that left you scratching your head or a group of people doing something a bit odd.  Or you may not have even noticed at all as a group of silent people walked past you, experiencing the sounds of the city without making any of their own.

It was a fantastic weekend of interventions by all the artists involved in the Interventionist Guide to Melbourne.  Did you see or hear anything over the weekend? I’d love to hear if you did.

As for the radical cross stitch component, there were two interventions over the weekend.  The first was a cross stitch on an existing grid on Lonsdale Street, just near the corner of King Street.  There is a beautiful old blue stone building there which is currently a barristers office, but in one of its manifestations was the home of the Seabrook Wine Merchants.  Fittingly – at some point in time – a grape vine was planted outside the front and over the years has been trained up the side of the building.  To help it along the way, a wire grid was attached to the side of the building.

This is what caught my eye.

During the G20 trials I spent a bit of time in this area and I noticed just how few children were around this part of town.  During the week most of them are in school I realise but even small children are noticeably absent.  And gee, try taking a pram through court security.. In the weekend this part of the city is a ghost town.

I decided this spot was perfect for a bit of commentary on the invivsibility of children in the urban space.

All the times I’d visited this space previously there wasn’t any greenery on the grape vine.  The last time I went past there was a very small amount.  So I was delighted to see how much had grown on it.  The vine created a perfect frame for what I’d planned to do!

There’s a few more pics on our Facebook Page if you wanna check them out.

The next stage of operations was the Melbourne Bicycle Beautification Society Outing in Flinders Lane.  Normally this is a site rich in bicycle basket bounty but Sunday there was very few.  So rather than sit there and stitch baskets as they came and went, participants were armed with a zine including instructions, a needle, wool and a thank you tag and sent around the city to find baskets in other places.

Each zine kit had wool to make one of these

And one of these wee tags to say thank you to the owner of the bicycle for being a cyclist

Hopefully I get some more pics from participants over the next couple of days.  Were you one of them?  Where did you find your basket?

The zine with the instructions and all my thoughts about the issues of intervening in the city will be online for download soon.  In the meantime I have a couple more kits with all the bits in them left to giveaway.  If you’d like to win one just leave a comment below and tell me what are some of the things you think about when you’re walking through cities.

Overall, a wonderful weekend! Massive thanks and congratulations to Lynda for her brilliant curating.  This has been a wonderful show to be a part of and I do hope we get to work together again soon.

Bicycle Beautification

So what are you doing on Sunday?

This weekend is the Interventionist Guide to Melbourne weekend of interventions.  The artists will be out and about on the streets creatively intervening with the city.  Or as the Craft Cartel blog puts it: an interactive artistic wake-up call to confront all that is predictable and boring in our city.

Initially I was gonna keep mine to sneaking about putting bits and pieces up in strange places for people to find.  But I got convinced that it would be much more fun to do something where other people can join in.

So…

The Melbourne Bicycle Beautification Society in association with Radical Cross Stitch and the Interventionist Guide to Melbourne are on a pilgrimage to reward Melbourne’s cyclist for their contribution to leisure, saving the planet, looking good and stopping oil wars.

In an effort to encourage spontaneous and uncontrolled acts of creativity, we invite participants to learn the art of bicycle basket cross stitch.

Materials and instructions will be provided during this casual afternoon of direct action against the pervasive boring of everyday life.

Participants need only turn up to Flinders Lane near the corner of Degraves Lane any time from 2pm until about 4.

This free event is part of the Interventionist Guide to Melbourne intervention weekend. Artists will be out and about from the 17-18th of October encouraging and even inciting random acts of public creativity. For details on other artists and how to engage in their interventions visit http://interventionistguide.org

Not brought to you by any government department or arts funding organisation.

RSVP on Facebook

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!

Back from Craftwerk 2.0

Some pics from Craftwerk 2.0, the exhibition in Jönköping, Sweden, where Kakariki and I participate. The exhibition was amazing and I could not stop smiling as I walked through. Lovely to see all these things that I’ve seen only on pictures in real life. Anyone near Jönköping should go see it, not to mention all the workshops and lectures they’ll be having during the fall and winter. The exhibition runs from September 19 until January 17 2010.

(I was all nerves and excitement, so I had some problems focusing on taking pictures, but at least some of them turned out ok.)

And a clip from local news programme Smålandsnytt (in Swedish).

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

Oh OK then

I didn’t post a picture of the piece going into the Explosive Expression show ’cause it’s not framed yet and photographing two different shiny materials is really freakin hard.  But I just pulled these off the camera and they’re not too bad.

It was stitched with silver metallic embroidery thread on black satin and is very shiny!

I really don’t think I was able to capture the true look of it with these shots but you do get the idea.  Hopefully once it’s framed and up nice on a wall there’ll be better ones to share with you all.

This was definitely a patience tester to stitch up as metallic thread is SUPER fragile.  I think I threw away as much as I used due to all the broken bits.  But the overall effect is very much worth the effort.  I hope they can show the piece under lots of bright lights so it’s extra super duper shiny!

Extra special thanks to Groundswell Collective for providing the original image and the inspiration!

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!