Quilting resistance: Padding protest into fabric

Join visual artist Diane Cescutti for a presentation exploring how quilting crafts, knowledge, and traditions have historically served as powerful tools of resistance, protest, and revolution.

As part of the You Have Not Yet Been Defeated live programme, this conference will highlight the significance of politicised craft practices to reveal the rich relationship between activism and textile craft, and how stitching our revolt within threads and fabric might still be relevant today.

Diane will explore different example across the globe such as the Underground Railroad Quilt Code used to guide enslaved individuals to freedom during slavery in the United States; Hawaiian quilts which show how native people used textile imported by missionaries as a new vocabulary derived from kapa moe (a type of barkcloth made by native Hawaiians); Asafo flags, a type of regimental flag of the Fante people of Ghana, which mixes akan proverbs, visual imagery and European heraldic tradition; and, more locally, how quilting is an important part of the history of women’s rights in Scotland and the United Kingdom.