A&D ANNUAL 2021

Mia Eklund

In Mia Eklund’s series ‘Not Here to Make You Comfortable’ she uses her textile practice to recall the methodologies and DIY punk qualities of subversive textile practices that emerged out of the 1960s. By engaging with this, the series critiques post-feminist viewpoints in society today and disrupts the socially constructed idea of hierarchies in artmaking. Mia explores traditional and non-traditional textile making techniques in creating a cargo net quilt that aims to question and challenge gendered binaries and domestic associations to textiles in order to align with a history of women’s creative knowledge and labour, with a sense of new power associated with the material. These textile nets use traditional quilt making methods yet present no utility to the now hybrid textile-based object. The nets have text pertaining to many participatory sessions spent making and talking about women's experiences with sexism and perspectives and ideas about feminism. Mia aims to posit ways that a continuum and cohesion in feminist thought may be achieved through participatory and intersubjective processes that value diverse experiences and identities. These approaches and theorisations take form through intersectional feminist theorisations and subversive visual techniques involving textile making.