Protest T-Shirts
Protest T-Shirts are created using found, donated, and recycled materials gleaned firsthand as part of my peripatetic art practice.
Ceasefire
Ceasefire T-Shirt began in the days following October 11 and the bombardment of Gaza by Israeli military forces.
I had travelled to Kerala as part of my practice. During the day I was sitting in a local tailor's shop, painting and sewing. One day I had come back to the hostel with a large bag of materials gleaned off the floor of the shop. I was sitting outside sorting them. I could hear the conversations of a group of Israeli travellers as they talked to family back home. I found the sound of their Hebrew taking me down paths of memory in my mind, things my mother and father had shared of their childhoods. Our family have been on the move, wandering and lost for generations and I have always struggled to feel belonging in the world. I stand with all people and persons who suffer persecution and dispossession and so I had been saying prayers for Palestinians trapped in Gaza and the West Bank, and throughout the Occupied Territories. But I said nothing - after all the textbooks and historic diatribes have been cooked beyond recognisable truth. The Israeli travellers bar one had no real concept of what life for Palestinian Arabs had been like since the formation of the Zionist State.
I had material, needle, and thread and an old t-shirt and so I began sewing the word "Ceasefire" in the languages of cultures in which I have spent a lot of time and close to, and into which I have in different ways been adopted - english, hindi, arabic, Yolŋu dharuk, and of course - pictures.
Free Our Julian
Free Our Julian is a work in process and relates to the story and predicament of Julian Assange, an Australian journalist, truth teller, whistleblower.
The fate of those who dare to follow the way of the truth teller in society today is the stuff of nightmares.
It is not an exaggeration to say that with each stitch, I say a prayer for the truth teller, for Julian Assange.
Julian Assange. How can anything ever make up for what you have suffered and sacrificed.
To your freedom, and to justice.
Further reading
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/24/julian-assange-court-hearing-extradition-death-sentence
, Free Our Julian. In progress. Donated cotton t-shirt, found and donated fabric, thread, saffron, tea. 2024.