hello hello!!
it’s been a while, but here i am again!!!
i’ve been back at my family home over christmas, and i’ve been sorting out my bedroom in preparation for moving back here next year. it’s amazing the random, useless stuff i’ve decided to keep over the years and not looked at once. i’ve started to make a photo book with the pictures i used to have on my wall and some of the random tickets and things. i wanted to keep it simple so that i would actually do it, and i found a way to make little photo corners for the pictures so it looks a bit like a photo album!! it’s very fun to add to and i’m excited to have it to look through in the future.
in my sorting i also found a little stitched banner i made that says, “those who make peaceful protest impossible will make violent protest inevitable.” presumably, i made it in college to take to a protest against the 2023 public order act. it reminded me of the thoughts i’ve been having since reading the rickard sisters’ adaptation of no surrender by constance maud. it gave me lots of thoughts around the downplay of how radical the suffragettes were. they were humiliated in their time and are still humiliated today. They are humiliated in attitudes towards women in politics as the few that there are carry the responsibility of them all – and so far in England we haven’t had very good examples. They are humiliated in attitudes towards people protesting issues today, like in the actions of just stop oil among others.
and i guess it’s important to systems of power and oppression that they are humiliated and downplayed so that, in general, people don’t know that their actions worked and were so necessary. i think it’s easy to forget that when we say they fought for the vote they really did fight for it. their passion and drive were incredible and i find myself drawing parallels between the hunger strikes of the suffragettes and of Palestine activists today. i highly recommend both the book and this j. draper video because they’re so informative and thought-provoking. since i’m recommending things left right and centre here, i’ll also recommend persepolis by marjane sartrapi, about her life growing up in (and out of) Iran. it’s an incredible graphic novel (and also animated film, although i haven’t seen that yet) and with everything happening there i have been thinking about it a lot recently. sartrapi puts everything so beautifully and empoweringly.
in terms of my art and uni, since october my direction has changed and my loom hasn’t gone any further than its laser-cut parts, but i wrote about weaving and time for my dissertation/extended essay and now i feel really inspired to get back to that alongside what i’m doing now. my main work/practice recently has been hand embroidery combined with sculpture and metalwork. before writing this i reread my last post where i talked about the weekly puppet-making feeling like a way of dealing with everything in world. i’d forgotten that i’d written that, and while i haven’t been involved in anything quite like that since, i do feel like i’m putting those feelings into my stitching.
since writing my essay i’ve also been having ideas about socially engaged practice. whenever i hear about cool community art things (like christine borland’s flax project which i researched for my essay) i always feel so inspired and i want to do things like them because i think they’re so important, but i also really want to sew and make things because i love doing that. both feel important to me, but then in my head, it becomes one or the other – either i sew or i socially engage, so then i’m not sure which direction i should be taking next because i feel like I need to choose. now i’m seeing that maybe that’s not the case, and if they’re both so important to me then i can do both. maybe socially engaged work is important in getting things out of my head and making things happen in the world, and more intimate forms of creation like my sewing are a way of staying grounded and connected to why i feel the need to do and share these other things.
in other news, i deleted instagram off my phone again and it feels so freeing (surprise surprise). i put off doing it because i have no storage on my phone so i won’t be able to download it again if i want to post anything but it got to the point where i wasn’t posting anything but i did feel like i was losing all my days to it so it didn’t seem worth the hassle. so i deleted it and immediately filled with ideas and started getting more things done so what do you know. there’ll probably be more blog posts now.
all the best,
freya :P