The Fabric of
Resistance
Political craft history and
contemporary craft ethics
Rayna Fahey

We live, dance, sleep, work, craft
and play on Aboriginal Land

Industrial revolution
• Mass shift from handmade cottage industries to
machine based manufacturing
• End to mutual-aid based subsistence communities
• Concept of work moved out of homes and farms and
into centralised factories
• Mass unemployment in fabric and textile based craft
industries

Luddites
• Direct action movement
• Started with lace and hosiery workers near
Nottingham
• First attacks in 1811
• “Machine breaking” made a capital crime in 1812
• 17 men executed under this law
• Countless men transported to Australia
• Agriculture workers followed lead
• Rural riots lead to foundation of the Trade
Union movement

Banners
• Began in the Trade Unions in Britain
in the 1840s
• Used iconography to portray lives of
workers, historical influences and
visions for the future
• Use spread to many different political
movements
• Use of banners continues to this day
in diverse forms

Flags
• Most effective form of creative resistance
• Used to symbolise united visions and goals
• Usually handmade by women active in movement

Bulgarian Uprising Flag
Sewed by Rayna Knyaginya for the April
Uprising in Bulgaria 1876
Text reads ‘Freedom or Death’

Eureka Flag
• Created in 1854 in Ballarat
• Sewed by Anastasia Withers, Anne Duke and
Anastasia Hayes
• Flag continues to inspire and unite working people
today

African Slavery
Harriet Powers

Suffrage Movement
• First major political movement to use crafts as a form
of subversive communication
• Major utilisation of clothing, banners, painting,
ceramics, knitting and other fabric crafts as
communication medium
• Suffrage Atelier - group within Suffrage movement
dedicated to producing visual material
• Produced at least 15o banners

A Militant Movement
• The British Suffragettes served over a century of
collective time in prison
• Tactics included:
• throwing bricks through windows
• marbles under police horses hooves
• defacing portraits in parliament
• burning mansions and churches
• Some died for the cause

Signature handkerchief sewn by Suffragette Janie
Terrano in Holloway Prison, 1912

Chilean Arpillera
•Pinochet regime - numbers of ‘disappeared’ numbered in
the hundreds of thousands.
•Smuggled out to the international press.

Greenham Common Women’s
Peace Camp
• Home of controversial military base that housed
nuclear warheads
• Greenham Common Women’s Peace camp was
the longest peace camp in history 1981-2000
• Creative resistance was the main form of
activism
• NVDA, fence art, poetry and song, banners and
costumes

Global Solidarity Quilt
Project
• Quilts contributed
from many countries
• Attached to the fence
as creative presence
from women all over

Woven Woolen Webs
• Challenged the
oppressive existence of the
security fences

Craftivism
“…based on the idea that activism + craft = craftivism.
That each time you participate in crafting you are
making a difference, whether it's fighting against useless
materialism or making items for charity or something
betwixt and between.
It's about the not-so-radical notion that activists can be
crafters, and crafters can be activists.”
From www.craftivism.com

Lisa Anne Auerbach

Lisa Anne Auerbach
lisaanneauerbach.com

Lisa Anne Auerbach
lisaanneauerbach.com

Cat Mazza

Stitch for the Senate
stitchforthesenate.us

Sara Rahbar
Iranian-born fabric
artist
Uses flags to make
statements about
American-Islamic
relations and
nationhood
myspace.com/
sararahbar

Melbourne Revolutionary Craft
Circle

Sorry Fence

QRacks in the Land

Fabric of Resistance Wiki
• Community based collaborative archive
project
• Compiling historical and contemporary craft
action, activists and theory
• radicalcrossstitch.com/wiki

Facing the Future
The Craft Movement is part of a long struggle
for social and political change.
In this time of increasing political and
environmental volatility, crafters should embrace
our revolutionary past and use our creative skills
to make and inspire change.
Direct action and solidarity action through craft
will save our planet and all the communities that
live on it.

Last year in UK less than 8% of all donated
clothes actually ended up being resold in charity
shops. A part are recycled as industry wipe cloths
and others shipped as charitable aid to the third
world countries. Some 7% are not even worth
being recycled or further donated, so they end up
in landfills. And this is just the clothes people
bother to donate to charity. In the UK three out
of four unwanted clothes a thrown straight to the
bin with out the chance of being reused.

Textile Production - Bangladesh

Sustainable Options
•Buy second hand
•Make your own clothes
•Buy good quality, sustainable fabrics
•Recycle your waste fabric

love and rage
radicalcrossstitch.com