Cloth and Bead Children: Unpacking the Orphan Tower

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 2012

Art Education, 2019

PhD Thesis, 2016

One Hundred Good Wishes Quilts (OHGWQ) are a contemporary form of material culture that commemorates an American family’s adoption of a Chinese child. Made and/or coordinated by parents in the midst of adopting, OHGWQ are community-based objects constructed from fabrics donated by a large number of family, friends, and acquaintances. A practice that spread largely via the internet starting around 2000, the OHGWQ tradition is based upon a host of phenomena and contexts: the sudden growth of China adoption in the late 1990s and 2000s; indigenous patchwork and quilting practices in China and the U.S.; the Western history of cultural appropriation; and present-day forms of web-based communication. Drawing on interviews with nearly two dozen adoptive parents, this research utilised a phenomenological approach to explore the experience of making a OHGWQ, a form of material culture never previously studied. The work explores how OHGWQ function on the individual or personal level, in such ways as celebrating a significant moment in a family’s history, making the adoption process seem less onerous and interminable, building support for a non-traditional method of family-building, and giving makers the opportunity to participate in a form of “everyday creativity” (Gauntlett 2011). The thesis also examines the OHGWQ’s place and meaning in the lives of those who organise and/or make the projects and within American society and culture at large. In particular, the thesis demonstrates that the OHGWQ project plays several “in-between” roles, functioning as a link or transitional device in each case: between being a non-maker and a maker, between disparate Eastern/Western cultural practices, between various groups of people, and between pre- and post-adoption senses of identity for the family as a whole and potentially for the adoptee. In essence, it is argued that OHGWQ connect people, cultures, and ideas.

Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal

Embodied encounters in and with crafting as method led to knowing with making in this research. A crafted bricolage of photographs from young children (aged 15 months to 5 years) was created at their early childhood centre. The children’s photographs became material for further thinking as they were transferred to fabric and combined into a quilt that was tie quilted by children and the researcher as artist/researcher/teachers (Springgay, Irwin, Leggo, & Gouzouasis, 2008). Our craft processes in quilt making initiated ongoing integrated art-making, teaching/learning, and conversations with and without words. Much research in early childhood has a focus on the child, but what do children focus on, and how might they be more than participants? Rich experiences throughout the co-creation of the quilt as a living inquiry provided spaces for learning and knowledge making. Craft as research and a piece of art to display for the learning community provoked questions and opened understandin...

The Journal of International Women’s Studies, Bridgewater State University , 2022

As a contemporary mode of subversion, the art of needlework has been revived from the category of the merely “aesthetic” to the expansive category of the “powerful.” Freestyle hand embroidery enables the socially disabled women of South Asia and other regions of the world to vent their trauma within the walls of their households. The select set of embroideries displayed here is expressionistic in art-style, presenting three micro-stories on bride burning, female foeticide, and Eve-teasing, as part of my personal project named “Embroidery Stories.”

univie.ac.at

Proceedings of the 9th …, 2010

Reflecting on one of Fröbel’s overlooked “gifts”, sewing and embroidery, this paper explores a recent renaissance in commercially available textile construction kits for children. Through a survey of such kits, we argue that revisiting embroidery in this digital age is a powerful leverage to introduce computation into material culture. In particular, we highlight the evolution of recent children’s textile construction kits beginning with the Barbie Fashion Designer in 1996 then moving onto more recent developments, like the LilyPad Arduino, that combines computation, ICT, fashion and craft. We discuss the implications of these designs for learning, play, and broadening participation in computing fields.

2007

This descriptive case study investigates the partnership of an urban university, two departments within that university, and the House of Tiny Treasures (an early childhood development center for young children of the homeless). Creation of the project, the initiatives of each department of the college, challenges, and future plans are described.

The Odyssey Quilts’ in Paul Arthur (ed) Australian Identity and Culture: Transnational Perspectives in Life Writing, Routledge Press., 2018

This chapter focuses on a set of three wall hangings, known as the Odyssey Quilts, that are held in the Power-House Museum in Sydney, Australia.1 They present cre- ative visual narratives—made up of appliqued quilting pieces—portraying their creators’ recollections of their experiences of childhood, wartime, and migration. The quilts are the work of ten Dutch women who immigrated to Australia after the Second World War: Gerada Baremans, Johanna Binkhorst, Yvonne Chapman, Ann Diecker, Anna Dijkman-Tetteroo, Ineke McIntosh-Eichholtz, Frances Larder, Vera Rado, Francis Widitz, and Vicky van der Ley. Five of them came from the Nether- lands (NL) and five from the Netherlands East Indies (NEI), now Indonesia.2 Draw- ing upon their family histories, as well as their personal memories and mementos, the women produced artists’ biographies as a resource for their collective endeav- our. These written narratives, along with photographs and other records that were aggregated into visual diaries, provide personal insights and stories that serve as a valuable contextual framework for interpreting the visual images embedded in the quilts. While the quilting pieces draw upon memories that are individual and personal, they communicate a larger story of post–Second World War migration to Australia, releasing, in condensed visual form, histories and contexts that the artists’ biographies present more expansively in words. In this chapter the visual diaries and supporting autobiographical material are used as an aid to the interpretation of the quilts as personal expressions whose relevance extends far beyond the individual stories they tell (Figures 1–3).

2008