08.11.2021 Views

Connected By Threads

Gill Crawshaw has created an illustrated essay that tells a story of disabled women and textiles. She makes connections between textile art created by contemporary disabled women artists and needlework produced by women incarcerated in institutions of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Like those people who turned to genealogy during lockdown to research their family history, Gill aims to show connectivity between one generation and the next, highlighting kinship, shared practices and traditions, driven by her curiosity about disabled needleworkers and textile artists.

Gill Crawshaw has created an illustrated essay that tells a story of disabled women and textiles. She makes connections between textile art created by contemporary disabled women artists and needlework produced by women incarcerated in institutions of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Like those people who turned to genealogy during lockdown to research their family history, Gill aims to show connectivity between one generation and the next, highlighting kinship, shared practices and traditions, driven by her curiosity about disabled needleworkers and textile artists.

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Kabir, in her work NO PROTECTION, “mourn[s] all the times we [queer trans disabled people] were failed

by those who were meant to protect us from harm”.

This has taken on even sharper meaning during the pandemic. Despite the public health policy of

shielding those vulnerable to infection by restricting them to their homes, and even though the government

claimed they had thrown a ‘protective ring’ around care homes, six out of ten Covid deaths in the UK have

been disabled people.

Segregation and institutionalisation of disabled people was, and continues to be, traumatic and lifelimiting.

Disabled artists continue to bring this to wider attention.

Confronting injustice

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