Kate Just & Tal Fitzpatrick, @COVID19QUILT
April 2020 - Continuing
The @covid19quilt is an online global quilt project on Instagram that I started with artist Tal Fitzpatrick to gather, narrate and share experiences of Covid-19 via craft. It builds on our shared history of creating socially-engaged textile projects that engage communities in thinking through, and making art about complex social and political issues.
The project started as a way of responding to the distress, illness and loss arising globally due to the pandemic. In this moment in history, people all around the world are confined to their homes; and many are living alone. Our work lives, relationships, health, sense of safety and connection to friends, family and community are significantly impacted. We are learning to see touching (others, objects in the world) as a danger to our health and the health of others. For many, this is creating a sense of loss and grief.
The @covid19quilt project invites artists and makers around the world to contribute a square image of a textile piece they created alongside a text that shares the story of the maker’s experience during Covid-19. Submissions are received via direct message to the @covid19quilt Instagram account or by emailing covid19quiltproject@gmail.com. New posts appear daily. To date over 471 submissions from over 30 countries in the world have been received. The accruing squares of the Instagram feed become the ‘quilt’.
The contributions reflect a sustained engagement with textile processes that address the diverse range of issues people around the world are facing. Using cross stitch, knitting, quilting, embroidery and hand sewing, contributors to this project address many themes and ideas. These include: privilege and power in relation to Covid-19, self- nurturing and imagination as tools of resilience, the role of craft in renewing our sense of tangible material connection, the issue of Covid-19 motivated racism, the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement in response to the death of George Floyd, the reality that the challenges that people living with mental health or trauma face are further compounded by isolation; LGBTQIA+ experience, and the importance of myth and imagination to our survival.
Other than the digital quilt, one of the key outcomes of this project will be the publication of a book that will feature images of the individual and collective squares of the quilt, the maker’s own statements about their work and experience of Covid-19, and reflective critical essays by writers who are experts in the field of art, craft, and society/social change. The book is expected to act as a time capsule of Covid-19 and be a testament to the power of craft and community to record diverse experiences of the pandemic.
Read more about the @covid19quilt project by writers Sophia Cai, Betsy Greer and Rosalyn D’Mello by clicking on each writer’s name. The @covid19quilt global quilt project was made possible through funding from the Australia Council for the Arts and Centre of Visual Arts (CoVA) at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
- Kate Just