creative forces

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.

Diana Weymar

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” 

Carlton Scarlett

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.”

Amy Marcus

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.”