The Subversive Stitch

Curated by Sharon Murphy

The Subversive Stitch is a group exhibition which focuses specifically on sewing, stitching and embroidery with its roots in women's narratives, communications and resistance. It reflects upon the subversive stitch as both image and locus of private, social and political concerns. The exhibition presents the work of seven visual artists whose work, conceived out of different circumstances, contexts, ideas and impulses, is united in the scale of its distinctive ambitions and the essential nature of thread to their practice and being.

For centuries, sewing had been closely aligned with women, holding domestic and feminine connotations, and ranked below the fine art mediums of painting and sculpture. Through suffrage and feminism of the 20th century, it made its burgeoning presence felt in the art world where women artists, art collectives and communities reclaimed and harnessed its use, subverting the very medium that had previously defined their position in art and society. Today although it is still heavily, if no longer solely, a woman’s medium, its subversive legacy continues, embracing the personal, the political and the social, the innovative, the technical and often unconventional, whilst redefining its status as a serious art form.