Website: www.stitchandyarn.com
Facebook: Stitch and Yarn
Instagram: @stitchandyarn
E-mail: tara@stitchandyarn.com
Tara is a modern quilt artist and designer with a preference for using recycled materials.
She is particularly conscious that, in most communities, textile art or craft is seen as women’s work and is – perhaps as a consequence – largely undervalued. Her current practice is an exploration of this, as well as the tensions between textile art and a crafts-based production practice; between corporate work and working as a maker and the personal consequences of that in a western capitalist society; as well as what those choices mean for the wider physical environment.
I would be art
Retail Price: NFS
Dimensions: 140 x 60cm (H x W)
Statement: 2019 marked the Bauhaus school’s 100th anniversary, where, believing women weren’t capable of thinking in three dimensions they learnt crafts. Today galleries still show more male artists; in textiles a man’s work is considered art, a woman’s, craft. I would be art – if I were made by a man.
Exhibitions: Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award 2019 (acquired as part of permanent collection)
Off the rails
Retail Price: A$520
Dimensions: 54 x 45cm (H x W)
Statement: Made from leftover secondhand shirts from another quilt – the plackets called to be a rails quilt. Increasingly I am drawn to using upcycled fabric, when it takes 20,000 litres of water to produce a kilogram of cotton and 39 million tonnes of textile waste is discarded each year.
Exhibitions: QuiltCon 2020
What’s your time worth?
Retail Price: A$1850
Dimensions: 140 x 60cm (H x W)
Statement: This work is based on the background pattern of an Australian $50 note and is a meditation on surviving as an artist in a country where the median income for those working on their practice full time is about a third less than Australia’s minimum wage.
Exhibitions: Art Quilt Australia 2017, Buda Contemporary Textiles Exhibition and Quiltcon 2018
© Tara Glastonbury