Blog #
97…September 2019
I love it
when artists take a conventional medium and use unexpected images to make a
point : the Afghan war rugs with helicopters and assault weapons woven into
their fabric; Shary Boyle’s delicious
Royal Doulton like figures doing naughty things (I’ll leave that to your imagination) and most recently, Ai WeiWei’s traditional vase showing refugees on the move and in
camps.
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| Diana Weymar |
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| Diana Weymar |
Now, Diana
Weymar, a BC textile artist has a show of her work at the Lingua Franca
boutique in downtown Manhattan of pieces where she’s placed Donald Trump
quotes against backgrounds of pretty coloured flowers and lace. Her first piece
was a floral cushion from her grandmother’s house onto which she stitched “I AM
A VERY STABLE GENIUS”
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| Carlton Scarlett |
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| Andrea Honore |
After she publicized the project, she began receiving stacks of embroidered Trump quotes. She photographs and posts
them on Instagram where she has 13,000 followers, she considers the Instagram
account a gallery that she curates. “Decorative
stitching is so subversive when it’s political” she says “It’s like the silent
resisters. You don’t have to have a bombastic feed on Twitter, you can just
pick up a needle and have a powerful statement.”
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| Amy Marcus |
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| Rowan Arberer |
And the best
part is that it’s called The Tiny Prick Project…
I can’t let
the chance to honour the beloved Toni Morrison pass by, particularly since she
spoke of language in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1993. So we’ll go out with her words “Oppressive
language does more than represent violence, it is violence…whether it is the
malign language of law without ethics, or language designed for the
estrangement of minorities…it must be rejected, altered and exposed.”
