Title: Piecing Fragments. Artwork hanging in a gallery (an old single-storeuy warehouse building.) The piece is constructed of multiple fabric patches hung as a cluster from one of the ceiling beams. The pieces are made of patches of old shirt fabric, fluorescent pink fabric, and cyanotype dyed blue & whte linen and cotton. Large oil paintings in grey, green and brown tones are visible on the far wall.
Title: Curvy Hip and Bum. A textile piece made from irregularly sized rectangles of blue linen, and bright pink nylon. The pink pieces create an abstracted outline of a person's curvy waist and bum. The piece is lit from the front meaning the hems of each small fabric rectangle shows as a neat, dark border to each patch.
Title: Piecing Fragments, Boot. Detail of on of the patches from the larger hanging piece. An outline drawing of a boot and partial lower leg is sewn in fluorescent pink thread on the ground fabric, which is constructed from irregularly sized scraps of different shirt fabrics and fabric dyed deep blue. All the shirt fabric are either striped or checked with thin pink or blue lines.
Title: Law Quilt. The quilt hangs from a beam in a white-walled room. The quilt's detail is unclear, from this distance it just has a random pattern of blue and white marks. Text painted on a nearby long wall reads "From early childhood I was taught the law would be..." the quote is cut off at the edge of the photo.
Close up on Law Quilt's edge, text on the wall reading "from early childhood" showing on the wall behind.
A close up on one of patches from Law Quilt. Each patch is a 15cm x 15cm square, pieced together from rectangular strips of fabric sewn around a small central square. The fabric is white with deep blue random brush marks, and blue text printed on it. This patch has a pink-striped fabric scrap at its centre, with the words "sodomy" and "person" clearly readable.
Title: Accompanying text to Law Quilt. A pillowcase hung vertically on a brick wall. The pillowcase is dyed a deep blue, with paler patches here and there. White text in neat hand lettering reads "from early childhood I was taught the law would be my protector and not my persecutor."
Title: Section 28 A postcard with text printed in deep blue, with an unevenly brush-applied deep blue border. Pink stitches on the left are arranged in a triangle, point facing downwards. The text relates to Section 28, reading "with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexualty as a pretended family... clause 28 was repealed in.... 2000 and in England and Wales.... 2003. Clause 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 addded Section 2A to the Local Government Act 1986, a law that covered England, Scotland and Wales. A local authority "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting..."
Pain Map: Close up photo of fabric with a hip joint x-ray printed in shades of blue, area visible is the ball and socket joint of the acetabulum and femoral head, and the sitz bone or ischial tuberosity. Small red stitches are scattered around the joint, indicating varying intensities of pain, most densely stitched around the acetabulum.
Holy Testosterone, Batman! An image printed on fabric in shades of blue dye, two glass ampoules with labels reading "Sustanon 100" and "Sustanon 250". Around the ampoules, long straight stitches in gold thread radiate outward like rays of sparkling light.
Mastectomy Shirt, detail. A formal cotton shirt with thin checked lines. Sewn on in thin deep pink silk is a circle where the nipple would be, a light pencil line visible out of alignment with the stitches. To the bottom right of the "nipple" is a small densely worked area of stitches marking the scar from where one chest drain was placed.
What Are Those Parts Called, Two. An image printed on fabric from a 1930s magazine, of lots of small labelled diagrams of household tools and machinery, titled "what are those parts called". Stitched over this in continuous lines thick pink thread is an outline image of a pair of men's briefs.
Masculinity Patchwork (Always In Progress). A fabric patchwork piece hanging from a wooden bar, against a wood panel external wall. The patchwork is constructed of irregular size and shape pieces of denim, most roughly rectangular, a couple taken from jeans, with the shape of the trouser panel. each piece has a different image dyed on in shades of blue. One has a sillhoutted pair of feet, this is the topmost piece. There's also a dildo harness down the bottom, a sewn self portrait of a man with scruffy beard and specs, a drawing of a clompy boot with a pink triangle sewn behind it, a page of a magazine with fish labelled "What is that queer fish?". It's a scruffy, patched together, wonkily constructed whole.
Queer Boot. A rectangle of fabric with an image dyed onto it, of an ink-drawn boot in shades of pale blue, on a dark blue background. Behind the boot is stitched hundreds of densely worked, small pink stitches, making a pink triangle, point facing downwards.
Q is for Queer. A piece of embroidered fabric is clipped to a dowel fastened to a wall. The fabric is dyed deep blue, and has images from a brain scan in pale blues and white. A small rectangle of light brown fabric is inset into the right side of the fabric, cutting into the largest brain scan image. The phrase “Q is for queer” is cross stitched into the brown fabric, the Q in pink, in a curly typeface, the other letters in a blocky sans serif font in shades of grey.
A line drawing of a pair of hands with shaded lines behind the thin dark drawn line, the left hadn holds a square of fabric, the right is pulling a thread tight after making a stitch. The background that the hands are collaged onto has two main areas, divided by a diagonal line from top right to bottom left. The top area has small grey blobs on an ivory paper, the bottom is light green with darker green marking a faint grid.
A piece of pale grey fabric clipped to a dowel, fixed against a wall. The fabric has an image sewn into it, made from hundreds of regularly placed, densely worked stitches, sewn in a grid. It's my lower spine taken from an MRI, looked at as a side-on slice so you can see the lordotic curve (which is mostly straight for me), and damage to several discs and two vertebrae.
A photo taken from near the flagstone floor, looking towards a whitewashed stone wall. Overhead, about 75cm from the floor is a long piece of muslin, supported at points so it hangs above the floor, then the final couple of metres gradually lower until it rests on the floor. Bootprints are sewn into the muslin, with faint feet in pink threads showing within the boot prints, as you move along the fabric, the boots fade away, and the footprints become stronger.
A close view of a piece of blue closely woven fabric, it has an inset piece of pale brown fabric set into it, and stitched across the seam where the two fabrics meet is a snail, shell over the brown fabric, grey body stretching up from the shell onto the blue fabric, eyes-on-stalks stretched upwards. Part of some cross stitch is just visible on the brown fabric, but you can't see enough to work out what it is.
A piece of fabric clipped to a dowel, fixed to a wall. The fabric has an x-ray of my pelvis in shades of pale blue and white, on a dark blue background. Partially visible in the pale areas of the pelvis are thin line drawn diagrams of old farming machinery, and on the left side, running at ninety degrees to the pelvis is "what are those parts called?"
The muslin with bootprints on, folded up. One distinct footprint in small blue stitches that look like densely worked tiny dots, the heel points north, toes south. On a layer of fabric under the top layer, a bootprint is stitched in dark blue stitches, very densely worked, the boot's toe points north, heel south.