Bio: Vanessa Marr (RSA) is Principal Lecturer and Course Leader at the University of Brighton. She is best known for her experimental autoethnographic practice, drawing with thread onto commonplace objects to phenomenologically embody her gendered, lived experience. Marr is drawn to cloth as a medium that holds the legacy of so-called women’s work and its potential for subversion and quiet activism. She has published and exhibited internationally on themes of autoethnography, drawing, stitching, and writing as creative research practice. She regularly leads collaborative, creative and research projects, and never stops learning, making, and writing.
Abstract:
This work includes a creative response to the theme of blame-healing and resistance, presented at the Threads of Connection, Sorry/Not Sorry conference at the Museum of Motherhood, 2024. It features a collection of embroidered ‘mother-love tokens’ – lace-edged handkerchiefs featuring hand-stitched representations of gifts given to me by my four daughters when they were small. I’ve titled this work Tokens of Resistance, capturing the spirit of craftivism (Greer 2014) and embroidery as an act of feminist emancipation because making each one has been an act of love, memory, and personal activism. As Roszita Parker writes in her seminal book The Subversive Stitch: ‘feminists in heir embroidery showed that the personal was the political – that personal and domestic life is as much the product of the institutions and ideologies of our society as is public life’ (Parker 1984,
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