meet the artist Archives - Page 2 of 13

31st July 202431st July 2024

Batool Showghi – Meet the Artist

Mixed media artist Batool Showghi explores themes of cultural heritage, memory, identity, and loss. Her work is concerned with the experience of women and the way in which this experience relates to cultural and religious boundaries. Pieces reflect on the theme of turbulence, immigration, disintegration of the family and the experience of displacement.

In response to the recent uprising of Iranian women, Batool has created a series of textile works around the theme of Struggle and Rise of Women.

Join Batool as she shares the stories that inspired her work.

Batool Showghi: https://batoolshowghi.com/

Batool Showghi

Showghi uses family birth certificates, passports, old photographs and documents to create her pieces. Her work and writings in Farsi are a poetic reflection on her memories, the environment she grew up in, the family, and a city which was lost during the war. These visual autobiographical artworks are designed to narrate and show the beauty and sadness of this struggle which will always be there.

Her figures come to life on canvas. The sewing machine and its needle are her drawing tools. She creates these heads, bodies, and hands intuitively, as if they look at the audience and question their plight. There is a sense of solidarity and movement between them. They know that they will succeed and overcome their struggle.

Showghi was born in Iran and moved to England in 1985. She received a merit for her MA in Design & Media Arts from the University of Westminster in 1997. Batool’s mixed media work and artist’s books can be found at: The Tate Britain, British Library, The Royal Navy Museum in Portsmouth, The Museum of Art and Literature, Yerevan, Armenia, and in many public and private collections.

Filmed at the Knitting & Stitching Show, London 2023.

For a more inspiration, please browse the ‘Meet the Artist’ collection on my YouTube Channel.

26th July 202426th July 2024

The Domestic Duster Project with Vanessa Marr

The award-winning Domestic Duster Project, established by Vanessa Marr in 2014, uses the power of stitch to give women a voice in domestic contexts where they are otherwise silenced, unheard, or ignored.

The project invites women to embroider their domestic experiences, complaints, and celebrations as words or images onto a yellow duster. This exhibition showcases a selection of dusters that have been embroidered by women from across the world, challenging the legacy of so-called women’s work.

Join Vanessa, as she shares the personal stories behind some of the dusters.

The Duster Project: https://domesticdusters.wordpress.com/about-this-project/ / https://www.instagram.com/domesticdusters/

“Each duster is unique and hand-stitched, transforming it from cleaning cloth to craftivist act. Whilst conversations often begin around cleaning, this is not the focus, rather it is a route to discussing women’s lived experiences and expectations of care, the mental load, and the sharing (or not) of home-based responsibilities. The experience of embroidering a duster for exhibition also addresses the benefits of stitching for health and wellbeing and the solidarity of group participation and common experience. The ever-growing collection includes hundreds of dusters that have been exhibited and presented widely in community, creative and academic contexts across the UK, mainland Europe, and Florida, USA. ” – Duster project.

This is an on-going project. Anyone, of any ability and from any part of the world can take part.

Filmed at the Knitting & Stitching Show, London 2023.

For a more inspiration, please browse the ‘Meet the Artist’ collection on my YouTube Channel.

16th July 202416th July 2024

L’Merchie Frazier – Meet the Artist

L’Merchie Frazier is a multidisciplinary artist and educator who explores themes of Black identity in the Americas and beyond. Black and indigenous people have a shared history of over 500 years in unwritten, unrecognised and unacknowledged narratives about the spaces they occupy, physically, mentally and spiritually.

Join L’Merchie as she shares the stories behind her work.

L’Merchie Frazier: https://lmerchiefrazier.org/

Story Quilt by L'Merchie Frazier — Story Quilt by L’Merchie Frazier

“The journey to establishing selfhood and importance that is manifest in today’s “call to action” is a trek of reclaiming the right to self-possession and ownership with elevated voice, story and space. Importantly, the direct action to embrace the right to exist, claim one’s own self-worth, beauty and love is a marked effort that fuels the move from insignificance to significance, to matter.”

This exhibition celebrates the Decade of African Descended People declared by the United Nations, 2015 to 2025. The LookBook quilts, The Quilted Chronicles series, participates in the restorative aesthetic to promote dialogue via an explorative historical lens, to reclaim the lives and legacies of Black and Brown people, children and their communities across centuries of memory, places and activism.

L’Merchie’s quilts select moments to confront the impact of slavery and systemic racism.

The inspiration to create these quilts is supported by archived threads of petitions, speeches, organisations, lawsuits, writings, media, witnessed violence and protests. The experience is documented from the kidnapping of Africans and their arrivals in 16th century, to the American Revolution, through the Civil War and the 13th Amendment in 1865, through the end of American Reconstruction, in a continuum to the 21st Century.