Based in Glasgow, Scotland
Website https://poppynash.com
Research project Disobedient Textiles
Location Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg, Germany - Textiel Lab, Tilburg, Netherlands - Peace Museum, Bradford, UK Glasgow - Women’s Library, Glasgow, UK - LSE Women’s Library, London, UK - Private Collections
Can you describe your research project?
Disobedient Textiles – garments, costumes, textiles and homeware art objects that double as forms of protest – are of huge interest to me. Having recently completed a funded research project that investigated this subject, I have refined my area of interest to focus specifically on examples of disobedient protest art created by those whose agency has been stripped or taken away: whether by incarceration, societal constraints enforced along lines of gender or sexuality, or even the removal of workers’ rights. This idea of protesting or transforming one’s individual or communal loss of agency through crafted, textile art objects is the key throughline of my ongoing research project. Indeed, the way that craft techniques are used in the creation of disobedient textiles is key. Craft is often denigrated as a ‘hobbyists’ endeavor, or considered ‘women’s work’; traditional craft can therefore offer an especially powerful tool for creating disobedient textiles, precisely because it appears to many as ‘harmless’. It can therefore be used to create alternative, subversive and ‘trojan horse’ forms of art-protest. Craft is also malleable and adaptable, and its skills are transferable: for instance, one example of disobedient textiles I looked at involved women using strands of their hair to embroider artworks while in prison.
Why have you chosen this topic?
I’m drawn to disobedient textiles, first and foremost, as a visual textile artist who has encountered various forms of agency loss and alienation throughout my life due to chronic illness and disability. This relates to access, and the ways in which public and private space often restricts or disinhibits the freedoms and agency of those with disabilities. It also pertains to more subtle, nefarious kinds of agency loss and constraint: for instance, my hourly reliance on various kinds of medication and health tech, as well as the constant ‘giving up’ of medical and personal data and information that, by necessity, I am asked to forfeit. In this context, as a practicing visual artist who is also chronically ill, disobedient textiles seem to me both an endlessly fascinating and inspiring form of protest, as well as a form of self-expression. Again, craft is essential here: using craft techniques to create these protest objects that are also beautiful, technically skilled art objects.
What research methods do you use?
In my thinking around Disobedient Textiles, I am inspired by the long history of DIY politics, protest, grassroots activism and community storytelling found in the disability protest and women’s liberation movements of the 1980s and 90s. I have had developmental meetings and sessions with relevant organizations and artists to help me direct this interest toward archival research. I recently met with founding members of the See Red Women’s Workshop to view their archived printed matter at the LSE Women’s Library – posters, pamphlets, and other ephemera – which made a huge impact on the visual culture of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Likewise, I met with banner maker Ed Hall, to view his private collection of hand-stitched and appliqued trade union banners that he has created over the past 30 years. I have also researched the holdings at several museums, with guidance from curators: at the Prinzhorn Collection, for instance, I viewed the jacket of Agnes Richter. Richter, who was interred in an institution in the early twentieth century, deconstructed and remade a standard issue garment given to patients, and embroidered it with encoded, cryptic messages of dissent, imbricating art and imagination into the clothing to transform and disrupt the conditions of her incarceration. Subsequently, at the Norwich Castle Museum, I viewed the works of Lorina Bulwer, craft art objects that take the form of textile ‘letters’ with embroidered, stream-of-consciousness text documenting the conditions of her incarceration in a workhouse.
In what way did your research affect your artistic practice?
Currently, I am actively developing and finishing this research project while also thinking about how to move it forward into a making stage. I’m thinking, in particular, about the ways that I experience agency loss as a chronically ill person, and how newly emergent health tech is involved in this (for instance, I constantly need to wear, via cannula, two monitors that use bluetooth and algorithmic programming to relay messages to one another about what levels of insulin should be administered). I’m inspired by the craft methods involved in the artistic works I have researched, and I am eager to think of ways to combine these craft techniques with digital practices to ‘mirror’ the type of agency loss I experience. That is, I would like to use the same kinds of tech that restricts my agency as a chronically ill person to create disobedient art objects that protest that restriction. To do this, I anticipate using algorithmic patterning, for instance, to programme digital embroidery machines to create disobedient textiles.
What are you hoping your research will result in, both personally and publicly?
I hope the research will result in new creative works. I want to create my own historically-literate disobedient textile garments, homeware items, and wearable propaganda that protest agency loss as it relates to the experience of being sick and disabled in today’s society, and the overt and subtle ways in which disabled people have their liberties and privacy stripped. Disobedient textiles are a uniquely powerful way to do this: while crafted garments and homeware items may appear stable and unthreatening, their coded messages of dissent turn them into powerful objects of disobedience, making us rethink the relationship between art object and domestic space. I also want to bring together the different practitioners, artists, and researchers I’ve collaborated with, to organize a series of public-facing talks and workshops around disobedient textiles.
