Stitched: Merging Photography and Textile Practices

Photography and textiles are ubiquitous; we continuously add to our personal diary of photographs on our smart phones and are wrapped in and clothed by fabric. Stitched: Merging Photography and Textile Practices explores the intrinsic relationship between these two mediums. Textiles have traditionally been dismissed and undervalued because of the gendered norms embedded within these historically domestic practices, including sewing, beading, embroidery, knitting, lacemaking, weaving, and dyeing. Photography, with its many uses for personal snapshots, evidence, surveillance, advertising, storytelling, and art, is a relatively new medium historically dominated by male practitioners. Although obvious distinctions exist, there are many threads of connection between the materials and processes used in both mediums: the natural and synthetic fibres that compose paper and thread, and the chemical process of creating a photograph or dyeing fabric.

The artists in Stitched proudly collapse the divisions and hierarchies shrouding these two mediums to reclaim, integrate, and assert new critical approaches to lens-based and textile art forms. Including emerging and established artists, the artworks in this exhibition explore ritual, memory, aesthetic inheritance, immigration, technology, and colonial and embodied archives. In a cultural landscape that continues to become more and more digitized, and a political landscape that becomes ever more cruel, their work asks what it means to create images that evoke the desire to touch and feel.

— Chelsea Yuill, from the Capture Festival website