Tokens of Resistance

Research output: Non-textual outputArtefact

Abstract

This work includes a creative response to the theme of blame-healing and resistance, presented at the Threads of Connection, Sorry/Not Sorry conference at the Museum of Motherhood, 2024. It features a collection of embroidered ‘mother-love tokens’ – lace-edged handkerchiefs featuring hand-stitched representations of gifts given to me by my four daughters when they were small. I’ve titled this work Tokens of Resistance, capturing the spirit of craftivism (Greer 2014) and embroidery as an act of feminist emancipation because making each one has been an act of love, memory, and personal activism. As Roszita Parker writes in her seminal book The Subversive Stitch: ‘feminists in their embroidery showed that the personal was the political – that personal and domestic life is as much the product of the institutions and ideologies of our society as is public life’ (Parker 1984, p.205).

They include a homemade bracelet made from children’s beads and a teddy bear pin, a picture selected from the many I’ve saved with the same message, and a remembered necklace strung with pasta tubes gifted to me so many times by my daughters after playgroup. I also stitched an illustration of my own baby dress saved by my mother, and a crochet square referencing a blanket I made for my granddaughter as hope for the future. Each object I have chosen is without monetary value, rather it is treasured for the value it holds as a token of love between child and mother. Inspired by the history of love tokens (Millmore, 2015), the cloth tokens left by mothers at the Foundling Hospital in London (1739 – 1955) and the complex history of handkerchiefs as token of memory and endearment (Mirabella, 2011), each artwork reaffirms our bond.
Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationUS
Edition09
Media of outputOnline
Publication statusPublished - Sept 2024

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