counter craft

Foreclosure Quilts - Kathryn Clark

via Kathryn Clark’s website:

“My previous work as an urban planner made me acutely aware of how big an impact the foreclosure crisis would have on our cities and towns throughout the United States. However, very little was mentioned in the news.

It was important to me to present the whole story in a way that would captivate people’s attention and make a memorable statement. Making map quilts seemed an ironic solution. Quilts act as a functional memory, an historical record of difficult times. It is during times of hardship that people have traditionally made quilts, often resorting to scraps of cloth when so poor they could not afford to waste a single thread of fabric.

The neighborhoods shown are not an anomaly; they are a recurring pattern seen from coast to coast, urban to suburban neighborhoods across the US. The problem has not been solved, it is still occurring, just changing shape, affecting more of us.”

For more information read her blog post about the series and an article from The Atlantic.

Kathryn Clark worked as an architectural and urban designer for seven years before becoming a full time artist in 2005. A traditional painter and photographer for twenty years, her studio slowly became full of remnants of yarn, wire and stacks of linen and burlap. One day, she put the paints and paintbrushes away, pulled out the fabrics and began sewing and layering thread.

Kathryn’s work revolves around the wabi-sabi principles of simplicity and awareness of time. Sewing and weaving express the time and effort it takes to create each piece while emphasizing the simplicity of needle and thread. She also writes a blog to inspire and inform other artists who work in the unique genre called Articraft: artists who use craft in their work and craftspeople who make art: www.kathrynclark.blogspot.com

Katherine May

Katherine May is a textile designer-maker based in London.

“My concerns for textile waste and fast fashion has taken me on a journey of patchwork and quilt making - it’s thrifty techniques and it’s history of collective making.”

text/image via Quilting: How to get started, The Telegraph:

Quilts do not have to conform to stereotypical images of faded florals suited to traditional country cottages. The contemporary 27-year-old textile designer Katherine May is creating four quilts for the Liberty show that turn most preconceptions upside down. Perhaps the most unusual is her quilt made from Barbie Doll and Action Man clothes, stitched together in a bold, free-form design with strong colours and an array of different materials. She collected hundreds of items of dolls’ clothing from car boot sales and eBay and created, in effect, a large collage backed with parachute material.

“I started quilting when I was 23 during the final year of my BA course at Chelsea Arts College,” Katherine says, “when I saw some beautiful, inspiring images of women quilting together in a circle.” She researched a little more and found some bold, expressive quilts, made by African-Americans in Alabama. Some had used fragments of denim work clothes, still with copper staining.

“I just loved that idea of recycling,” she says. “The many women who now come to my quilting workshops — who range from their twenties upwards — also love finding a use for those little bits of fabric you don’t want to throw away. There is a real mix of styles. A quilt is like a canvas to express yourself.”

via katherinemay.com:

The Pattern Project
January 4, 2012 / Projects

Subverting the feeling of a needle in a haystack – I locate the value in an environment full of expired meaning. A quiet action amongst the many hands and flow of conveyor belts in the textile recycling factory. I sift through the mountain, forming my own piles, finding fragments to join together with intimate hand stitches. An action that is opposite to the down grading process, of breaking down fibres to become stuffing and wipers, I deconstruct to reconstruct, through stitches, new meanings and value into the textiles. By sharing this process with others, the quiet action spreads, and becomes louder.

Embroidered Quilts from the Adithi Collective

via University of Illinois at Chicago

Exhibit at the Library of the Health Sciences, during October and November, 2003*

Adithi is a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting women. Adithi’s mission is to empower a diverse group of Indian women living in poverty. The Adithi project is distinctive for its transformation of the traditional kantha (embroidered quilts) into a vehicle for expressing contemporary social and political concerns, including a broad range of health issues.

Since the 18th century, Indian women have made sujuni kanthas or embroidered quilts. This tradition was revived in the late 1980s when the Indian women’s organization, Adithi, joined the Mahila Vikas Samyong Samiti, an organization in the Bihar State, to encourage poor rural women to design, embroider, and sell these kanthas in order to supplement their incomes. The important theme of women’s collective activism appears on many of the quilts and affects the structure of the quilt-making process, where numerous women collaborate to create the designs, embroider, and provide one another community and support. Although they seek to sell their designs, the women have not shied away from difficult themes.

Based near the village of Bhusura, the quilt project has helped support widows, housewives, and the school fees of children, especially girls. The quilts display figures delicately embroidered or appliqued on cotton or locally made silk. Many of the figures are drawn from the lives of the craftswomen, showing their work, their landscape, and their social struggles. Among their topics are women’s work, domestic abuse, rape, forced prostitution. In this exhibit, the kanthas all illustrate the women’s efforts to improve their health care.

For more information see: Sandra Gunning, “Re-Crafting Contemporary Female Voices: The Revival of Quilt-Making among Rural Hindu Women of Eastern India,” Feminist Studies 26.3 (Fall 2000), pp. 719-26.

*note: After some searching, sadly it looks like this organization is no longer running, but the work it produced is still important.

The Lynch Quilts Project

image and text via: http://blackthreads.blogspot.com