Every now and then I get this rush of optimism and feel like the world is starting to become a better place.  And I feel like we can make a difference. And I feel like there is such a thing as justice.  And then I read a story like this.

Olek has been inspiring me and my work for years.  She is one of the few ‘yarnbombers’ out there who doesn’t do her work to make shit pretty rather to make a difference.  She is political. She is outrageous. She is fearless.

So to think someone like Olek can be so wholeheartedly shafted by the system in such an obvious case of injustice really does give me the chills.  The idea that her situation was exacerbated by the fact she was carrying scissors – like me and all my friends do – really did fill me with dread.  But of course, the thought that defending yourself from unwanted sexual attention can turn into an arrest, charges and convictions is truly messed up.

We can’t let our sister go through this without a fight.

I call all of you readers in the UK to get outraged about this case.  Write to your MP, your newspaper, talk about it to your friends, engage other artists in solidarity actions and most importantly, raise some funds! This case MUST be successfully appealed.

There aint a huge amount of organising I can do from the other side of the globe.  But I will do my darnedest to raise some cash.  You have two top ways to donate. Visit Olek’s appeal site and grab one of her awesome postcards or prints.  Or get into the radical cross stitch shop and get yourself a pattern or some zines and I’ll give 100% to Olek.  Make sure you say in the notes it’s for Olek (in case you’re reading this ages into the future).

Olek, we love you and we’ve got your back sister.

Love and rage and solidarity

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United Struggle Project – The journey so far from United Struggle on Vimeo.

There aren’t a huge number of musicians out there who are not only revolutionary in their music, but also in their lives. Izzy Brown is one of them. Born in Australia but staunchly and respectfully living on Aboriginal Land, Izzy takes the concept of solidarity to heart.

The United Struggle Project is the latest project Izzy is embarking on and it’s an epic one!

Giving a voice to displaced people globally through music. United Struggle Project aims to produce cd/dvd’s of songs, music videos and documentaries recorded in remote communities slums refugee camps and prisons in Africa, Palestine, Afghanistan, Cambodia and Australia. Help us bring these voices to the world

I for one, am definitely keen to help this project out, and have donated some funds from the Radical Cross Stitch store.  But the more the merrier! Pop over to the United Struggle Project Pozible page and chip in today. And any djs/producers out there want to chip in creatively, think about donating a beat. Check the facebook group for more details.

Solidarity!

Blimmin brilliant fun! We made a series of Fence Hijackers: embroidered guerilla gardens, designed to be hung on your friendly neighbourhood vacant block of land.

If anyone is keen to make their own, you can download the instructions here.

Thanks everyone who came for a super fun day, I’m loving randomly stumbling across hanging gardens in all your houses!

xx

Rayna

It was a mild night, sometime in late January 2009.  I felt like starting a new cross stitch project I’d been planning for a little while.  It was the night Barack Obama was to formally become President of the United States of America.  It seemed appropriate to stay up late and watch.

For the previous few years, vast tracts of the worlds population had been observing international and domestic policy changes in the US with great dispair.  It seemed the world was on a collision course with an almighty apocalypse, and the worlds richest and most powerful nation was leading the way with all guns a-blazin.

But then along came this intelligent, articulate and extremely witty man with a dream and a vision for a peaceful, prosperous and egalitarian future. The world sat up and took notice.  The people of America heard the dream, saw the vision and believed it with a deep love that only people with a strong understanding of the foundation of their nation and the dreams of their forebears can feel.

So I sat there on my couch watching the spectacle unfurl.  It was hard not to feel cynical. I have always had a passionate interest in electoral systems and electoral reform and have a pretty decent knowledge of the corruption of democracy – particularly by lobbyists – within the US system.  But as I began this stitch and watched the joy on the faces of the people on the screen in front of me, I started to think that maybe he might have the power to turn the great ship around. After all, there are plenty of examples of countries that have transformed themselves with a new leader with a strong vision and a determination to get things done.

Four years on, it does sadly seem my hopes were misplaced and my cynicism was more apt.  When Obama started hiring former Goldman Sachs staff you couldn’t help but feel it was all over.  Granted, he’s made some bold moves and was most probably the reason America didn’t completely implode through their recession.  But it’s been far from the Change We Can Believe In.

But the problem doesn’t lie with Obama, or even America. The problem lies with a system that takes decision making power away from those who are affected by the decisions.  On a local level, I live in a pretty disempowered community.  And more often than not, I hear locals discussing issues in relation to how to get the government to fix them, not how the community itself can take ownership of its own issues and find its own solutions.  This makes me pretty sad.  I don’t want to live in a world of complainers, I want to live in a world of doers!

Drawing on anarchist traditions of rejecting hierarchical power structures, the Apron for our Children seeks to inform and remind older and younger generations of men and women, boys and girls of the institutions that seek to hold us captive.  This apron was created as a love letter to my children, urging them to be aware of their past, and seek freedom for their future.

There was this moment in my life where everything became a whole lot clearer; the moment it was explained to me that gender identity is not an either-or, rather it’s a two axis grid. And your position on that grid is not necessarily fixed but can, and often does, shift.

Because, like all forms of identity, gender identity is in the eye of the beholder. We are all unique individuals and whilst we might have many things in common, how we identify ourselves and how we see ourselves within our identities is an entirely personal position. Of course, how society sees these things is an entirely different proposition..

Once I began to see my own gender identity as a fluid spectrum I literally stopped worrying about it.  It was as if I had been wearing glasses of the wrong prescription and rather than continue to try and squint to see, I just took them off.

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As part of the Tapysteria Hacks series, I chose to embroider this quote by one of my most significant role models in terms of understanding gender identity, Patti Smith. One day, doilies shall experience that same clarity.

Old School (2012)
It’s Never Too Late to Mend Exhibition – Incinerator Gallery

Bringing the technique of fence stitching into a gallery context, ‘Old School’ is a homage to the embroidery designers of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. ‘Old School’ is a reference to the little understood history of political craft. ‘Old School’ pays tribute to remix culture and those who seek to keep knowledge free.

The mother as an artist. Disbanding the myth of the artistic sanctuary and a space to create.

Two and a half hours of embroidery, feeding, changing, entertaining, and cuddling.

Photography: Marcus Salvagno
Editing: Karl Fitzgerald
Music: Line of Flight – Revolution Void

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This piece was created for “It’s Never Too Late to Mend”.

The Making and Baking.. was born out of a desire to contribute to the conversation about the value of handmade.  All too often purveyors of handmade goods find themselves having to justify their prices in the face of mass production of consumerables.  Comparing a uniquely designed, handmade piece of clothing against a one of thousands, sweat shop produced item shouldn’t even happen, yet it does. And far too often makers are left to defend their ‘high’ prices, when the reality is that the mass producers should be the ones explaining their prices. This Is Handmade is a brilliant video project which works with this idea.

The Making and Baking.. was also inspired by observations of gender within the arts. As a mother and an artist I rarely have the luxury of uninterrupted creative time, I share my creative space with small children and I have to manage gallery time with childcare.  These are not really issues that phase me as my children are my muses and are very much a part of my practice. What interests me is the different status that artists attract due to their family status. Certainly my experience and observation of group shows is that it’s the single guys who get the most time and attention paid to their art.

Luckily for me, my practice tends to attract similarly radical curators and art workers so my colleagues have always been open to supporting my children being present and part of my art. However, I know this is not reflective of the art world as a whole.  Hopefully this piece will plant some seeds for people to think about the way they value art workers as parents.

Thanks again to Marcus, Karl, Hannah, Jose and the kids for helping put this piece together, arohanui xx

Greetings Premier Ballieu

I read with great sadness at the decision by your government to scrap the State carbon reduction target. Victoria is one of the greatest polluting regions per capita on the planet. And we need to be moving forward not backwards on solutions for climate change.

I am part of a number of active organisations in Melbourne’s West, working hard to create sustainable, localised food, energy and clothing options for our community. Not only is our work making a major difference to the lives of people involved in our activities, but has a ripple effect across our whole community as more people grow their own food, get out of their cars and onto buses and bikes and invest their money on locally made items.

It is so inspiring to be part of a movement of people working to make the world a better place.

So it is even more disappointing to read about the head in the sand attitude your government is taking towards sustainable policy, especially in relation to energy production.

I urge you to:

• Reinstate the carbon reduction target
• Support clean energy
• Bring an end to coal fired power

Your government has a responsibility to take action on climate change. I want you to take action to cut pollution and support a safe climate future for my family.

Warmest regards

Rayna

Ahoy me hearties! Land pirates straight ahead!

Oh to be a speculator.

It must be such a great life buying up blocks of land, sitting on them for a few years watching the community grow and the infrastructure develop, then when the time is right, flip them off for some easy capital gains. Even better when the land isn’t in your suburb so you can externalize the problems that vacant land creates like weeds, rubbish, vandalism and housing affordability pressures. Even better when the council has a rates system that charges on land and buildings so the blocks around yours with houses and businesses on them have to pay more than you do.

Well, just ’cause the council thinks it’s ok for all these pirates to be sailing around our hood, looting the bounty created by our communities, doesn’t mean the Melbourne Revolutionary Craft Circle does.

We’re sick of looking at these blocks. We want a re-imagining of how we use land in Maribyrnong. We want to address housing, sprawl, waste, food security, transport, health, community gardening and play.  In our separate lives we work on these projects but are daily undermined by the pirates.  We want the people of Maribyrnong to join with us in starting the conversation about the blight on our suburbs that is vacant land and what the Council plans on doing about it.

Currently, they don’t see it as a problem.

So, we ask the question “What else could go here?”  We are surrounded in blank canvases and we call on all citizens to spend some time thinking about what better ways we can use this land. Let’s keep animals, let’s grow food, let’s grow trees, let’s build parks!

Have you an idea? Put it on your closest fence tonight! Or get some chalk and write your ideas on the footpath! Use your imagination people, our communities are in our hands.

Love + rage

MRCC

You are all very very very welcome to my first ever solo exhibition “It’s Never Too Late To Mend”.

The show runs from Friday the 13th of April until Sunday the 13th of May. It is showing at Incinerator Gallery in Moonee Ponds, Melbourne.  For those who don’t know Incinerator, it is one of Melbourne’s most beautiful buildings. It was originally designed by Walter Burley Griffin (aka the guy that designed Canberra) as an actual incinerator, one of a number he designed at the time.  At the time, locals were concerned about the amount of waste going to landfill and decided they wanted an incinerator to turn the waste into clinker ash which could be used on the large number of roads which were being sealed at the time. There’s a great article about the history of the building (including a cute photo of my curator, Richard), here.

While the building wasn’t used for its original purpose for very long, it now exists as one of the greatest community assets in the West.  And even decades on, the fantastic design of the building proves that function shouldn’t preclude beauty.

It is truly (a sometimes daunting!) honour to be showing in this wonderful space.

It’s Never Too Late To Mend is part retrospective and part new work and it covers a wide range of mediums from traditional canvas needlework through to large installations, photography and animations.

The timing of this opportunity was perfect. I had just come out of a six month break from ‘work’ craft and over that time I had spent a lot of time reading craft and design history and teaching myself new techinques. Most significantly I re-read The Subversive Stitch (AN ABSOLUTE MUST READ!!!!!) and spent a lot of time considering which direction I wanted to take my craft in. I see most of my work as having two roles: 1. Encouraging creative types to be more political (and more brave) and 2. Encouraging activists to be more creative (and less serious..).  But the more I meditated on these ideas, the more I realised that there was a third role that I hoped my work would play which was to encourage better design. Not that I really see myself as a particularly good designer, but I do believe that in this time of global ecological crisis we are facing, if we are going to make stuff, we should make a real effort to ensure it’s bloody good stuff that’s going to be around for a while.

In this exhibition, I have examined the history of needlework design and come to the conclusion that, bar a few exceptional examples, needlework design has been pretty rubbish since the end of the art nouveau and art deco periods. In fact, if you want fine examples of cross stitch design, you’re better off going back further than that.

So I have sought to go back to those times and pick up some of those design techniques and bring them to a new time and place.

It’s Never Too Late To Mend asks creative communities to consider our roles as makers and vision shapers, to consider the urgency of our consumerist climatic crisis: to reflect on our practice and demand the best of ourselves for the sake of our collective imagination.