No Loose Strands

About

We will be exploring the ways women weave together themes of gendered work, political protest and community, by exhibiting works by invited artists and also creating pieces of textile art during community workshops throughout the month. The exhibition will feature quilts, banners and embroidered pieces as well as books, zines and journals from the Library’s collection, alongside new works created during workshops to be hung permanently as part of the fabric of the Library. 

While simultaneously a historically ‘feminine medium’ and a means of transgression, textile art provides a radical insight into knowledge production and communities. 

Textile art is often collaborative, whether produced in knitting, weaving and sewing groups where people socialise, create support networks and share skills, or passed on from one generation of a family to the next. Textile arts have been a prominent and iconic aesthetic in radical organising globally and in the UK, from early 20th century Suffragette banners through to the 1970s and the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners campaign of the 1980s. Banners are still prominent in contemporary direct action and protest groups: Sisters Uncut held banner making sessions ahead of their action in support of the women detained at Yarl’s Wood in 2018.

Community projects to create textile art often explore identity, generational knowledge, and the meaning of shared labor and nurturing creativity.  The Keiskamma Altarpiece, a monumental piece of embroidery and beadwork, was made by 130 women in South Africa’s Eastern Cape in the early 2000s to commemorate lives lost and altered by AIDS and express the community’s resilience ; in 2005 The Knitting Map was worked on by over 2,000 women in Cork, most of them older and working class, to commemorate the city’s status as a European Capital of Culture ; during protests following the murder of Mike Brown in St. Louis, Missouri in 2017, black women formed The Yarn Mission to share space away from the streets, knit together and organise for Black Liberation.

A key inspiration for the exhibition, the Feminist Library has invited the South London Refugee Association to showcase a quilt that their women’s group created during the recent Covid-19 lockdowns. Between April 2020 and July 2021 the group met weekly online to support and care for each other and organise for change within the UK’s hostile immigration system. The display is accompanied by a zine created by the SLRA that explores their experiences as migrants and refugees including discussion of the impact of being designated people with ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ in Lambeth. This part of the exhibition will be shown at the South London Gallery from the 4th to the 25th of March and then will travel to the Feminist Library, where it will be displayed until the end of May.

The Feminist Library will also be showcasing a series of textile artworks created by women from all over the world, and art produced in our workshops, from the 3rd of March until the 27th of May.