I lead a workshop in Oxford to make a Processions 2018 banner for OVADA in Oxford. The Processions 2018 event was held on 10th July in London to commemorate 100 years of women’s suffrage.
We wanted to involve OVADA’s associate artists and asked them to provide black and white images of strong women, through their families, as the starting point for the banner.
We held the workshop on a day during the Dawn Rose Red festival as a drop in for associate artists to contribute towards the making of the banner. They embroidered letters, painted the background, stitched and ironed.
On 10th June we took the processions 2018 banner to London. Over 30,000 women marched from Hyde Park to Parliament Square.
it was an amazing day to be part of and I am very proud of all the hard work that was put into our fantastic banner.
Every year “White Armband Day” takes place on 31 May, the anniversary of the start of the campaign of ethnic cleansing which took place in the town of Prijedor, northern Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Bosnian Serb authorities issued a decree on local radio ordering all non-Serb citizens to mark their houses with white flags or bedsheets and to wear white armbands when leaving the house. This began campaign of extermination.
To mark this anniversary I have been given the opportunity to exhibit ‘Lie Down’ within the entrance to the art department at City of Oxford College for 4 weeks during their end of year shows and the run up to the end of the summer term.
This is a fantastic opportunity to reach a new audience some of whom may have been around in 1995 but would have been too young to know anything about the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Last month I was selected as the Remembering Srebrenica Community Champion of the month for February. I am really excited and extremely proud of this recognition.
“Each month the team at Remembering Srebrenica selects a ‘Community Champion of the Month’ to celebrate the inspiring work of our fantastic supporters across the UK. Community Champions for the 11 months preceding July will be invited to light a candle of remembrance at the UK Srebrenica Memorial Service in July.
We are delighted to announce that February’s Community Champion of the Month is Katie Taylor!
Katie is a contemporary textiles artist from Oxford who attended a ‘Lessons from Srebrenica’ delegation to Bosnia last year. Her work was shown in a recent exhibition, disPLACED, which took place at the P21 Gallery in London, and showcased her powerful and thought-provoking new piece, ‘Lie Down’. Over the course of three weeks, hundreds of people had the opportunity to engage with Srebrenica thanks to her work.
‘Lie Down’ was a thoroughly creative and original way to get people to think about the horror of genocide. The piece, made by rags soaked in coffee, represented the countless ligatures used to detain prisoners and echoed the white armbands that Bosnian Muslims were forced to wear, while its height of 150cm references the height at which boys were sent away with their fathers. Katie said that the act of ripping up material made her ask herself, “Whose job had it been to create the blindfolds and fabric ligatures? Had they considered and known of their intended use?” By examining the genocide in this way, the audience were invited to think about those who are complicit in genocide. Images of ‘Lie Down’ can be viewed here and Katie also plans to mark Srebrenica Memorial Week with a new exhibition.
Everyone at Remembering Srebrenica would like to thank Katie for her hard work in using her talent to bring the lessons from Srebrenica to a whole new audience.”
Exhibition Dates: 20th January – 10th February 2018
Curators: CARU | Contemporary Arts ReSearch Unit
Artists: Alissar McCreary, Janice Howard, Robin James, Ray Hedger, Katie Taylor, Alex Newton, Fiona Harvey, Anna Yearwood, Aldobranti andBlanca Rodriguez Beltran …as well as those who participated in the disPLACED workshops.
Contemporary Arts ReSearch Unit presents a group exhibition in the beautiful P21 gallery. The show includes a solo exhibition by Lebanese artist Alissar McCreary, which showcases her practice-based PhD research.
Upstairs on the ground floor, the exhibition brings together artists whose work evokes a wide range of responses to the title theme ‘disPLACED’. The works include photography, video, painting, prints, sculpture, as well as an accumulative installation of small figurines made by the public. Visitors are invited to create and add their own little person to the installation.
Downstairs, Alissar McCreary presents the culmination of her seven-year research into her experience of displacement as a Lebanese refugee. Her PhD, titled “Hybrid Residues/Memories: Utilising active participation within sculptural art practice as a direct form of communication to implicate experiences of war and displacement.”, explores the reciprocity between art, active participation, and traced memories of displacement. ‘The aim of my research is to examine what American philosopher and artist David Abram calls ‘sensorial empathy’. In my thesis I have appropriated the term and redefined it as the ‘silent sense’. I interpret this ‘silent sense’ as a kind of connection or ‘knowing’ that we intuitively recognise but cannot always articulate or express with language. I am interested in how and when sensorial empathy takes place, and how it might affect the viewer’s perception of the displacement which is happening every day to millions of people in the world.’
I will be showing the following three pieces of work:
In the early stages of the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnian Muslims were mandated to wear a distinctive white armband and display a white flag or sheet on their homes, marking them apart from their neighbors. This piece of art is meticulously crafted from strips of white sheets and tablecloths, a direct allusion to this painful period.
As the conflict unfolded, separation became more pronounced. Muslim men and women were segregated, with young boys undergoing further division based on their height. Boys under 150cm were permitted to remain with their mothers, while those exceeding this height were compelled to depart with their fathers, often facing an uncertain fate. This artwork hangs at precisely 150cm, symbolizing this grim distinction.
The lower segment of the artwork is imbued with a natural coffee dye, a potent emblem of community in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Before the war, citizens of all backgrounds would come together over coffee, transcending religious or ethnic lines. After the conflict, many Bosnian Muslims returned to their homes, only to discover that other families had occupied their dwellings. In a poignant gesture, they were sometimes offered coffee in their own cups, a symbol of displacement and dislocation.
The piece itself spans the width of a human body, extending onto the floor, evoking thoughts of burials, mass graves, shrouds, and mortality. It bears the title ‘Lie Down,’ which serves as a haunting reminder of the last words uttered by many before facing execution.
During the grim process of unearthing mass graves and the quest to identify the victims within them, forensic teams uncovered cloth ligatures and blindfolds at various mass grave sites in Srebrenica. These ligatures and blindfolds often shared the same fabric source, serving as crucial evidence during the Hague trials, demonstrating a level of organisation and substantiating claims of genocide. Here, all the cloth strips are knotted, resembling their potential use for such a somber purpose.
Lie Down - Detail
Lie Down - Detail
Lie Down - Detail
Lie Down - Detail
Lie Down - Detail
Lie Down
Lie Down - Detail
Lie Down installed at P21 Gallery London
Lie Down installed in The Guildhall London for Srebrenica Memorial event 11 July 2018
Lie Down installed in The Guildhall London for Srebrenica Memorial event 11 July 2018
Lie Down installed in City of Oxford College June 2018
Lie Down installed at Lincoln College Oxford
Lie Down installed at Lincoln College Oxford
Lie Down installed at Lincoln College Oxford
Katie Taylor talking about Lie Down at Lincoln College Oxford
Whilst working on this current piece, I have been aware that the artistic process itself has become as important as the initial ideas and the finished piece. Almost like a performance piece the act of making has added meaning to the finished work.
Tearing fabric strip
Whilst tearing the strips I considered who had actually torn the fabric for the Serb army. Whose job had it been to create the blindfolds and fabric ligatures? Had they considered and known of their intended use?
I do know that some of the blindfolds and ligatures were possibly scraps from a manufacturing process, these were collected and used in bulk. Others however would have had to have been produced.
Exhuming the work
To dye and stain the knotted fabric, I have used waste coffee from a local cafe ‘The Missing Bean’ along with a combination of other dye stuffs and rusty iron. The whole piece was left for a week and was then uncovered to discover the effects.
This uncovering had a very visceral sense of exhumation. The act of burial was an important aspect of the process for this piece of work, but the uncovering too became important as well.
It is these aspects that often only become apparent during the artistic process itself and aren’t always part of the planning.
For this piece, particularly, the importance of these elements is poignant. A whole new level of conceptual meaning has been added.
Developing ideas from research I have started to tie ideas about Bosnia’s blindfolds together.
The arm bands lead to blindfolds
Coffee brought communities together but later dove them apart.
Distant images of mass graves can look like knots
Left: Bosnian Mass Grave image Right: knotted cloth dyed in coffee
Mind map of ideas
I want the ideas to act rather like a timeline within the piece:
Men and boys over 150 cm separated from women and boys smaller than 150 cm.
All Muslims required to wear a white armband and hang a white flag or sheet from their homes, so that they could be identified.
Blindfolded and with hands tied behind their backs the men and boys were executed, and buried in mass graves.
Intermingled and piled together these bodies / parts needed to be identified.
Sketchbook thoughts for finished piece of work
Initial coffee and rust dyed sample next to a sample of knotted white cotton
Knotted white cotton with details
Knotted section created from looped (blindfold) sections
Test photo in studio space to assess size and visual impact
The piece is fixed at 150 cm high as a reference to the height point for boys being selected to stay with their mother or not.
White loose arm bands start the piece with details of whitework embroidered family initials. This addition gives a reminder of the personal nature of events.
Body width as a reference to a grave, coffin or shroud.
Knotted from loops of fabric strips as the blindfolds would have been.
Knotted together, intermingled creating a mass of knots each individual. reference to a mass grave.
Within Mass graves, forensic anthropologists found many blindfolds and ligatures. It was noted that many appeared to be very similar. Sent away to a forensic lab in The Netherlands, Chemist S. E. Maljaars drew up a report for the Criminal Tribunal in The Hague.
In her analysis, the Dutch forensic expert showed that the bodies from the primary grave, where the victims executed at that location were initially buried, were transferred to several secondary graves. The pieces of the same fabric were thus found in two or more locations.
The evidence also helped to prove a level of organisation during events and therefore was part of the evidence that proved Genocide rather than mass murder.
I currently have two pieces of work in the 19th Mini Textiles Exhibition at Umelka in Bratislava, Slovakia. I was excited to be able to make the Private view on Wednesday 31st May.
The exhibition includes the work of 56 international textile artists and 22 students selected from 135 applicants. It is an exciting opportunity to be included.
Visitors to the Mini Textiles Exhibition
Sum
One of the two pieces of min exhibited within the exhibition.
Sum and Lay Waste
A lovely after show meet up, was arranged for all the exhibiting artists. This was a wonderful opportunity to make contacts and connections and I was invited to a graduate fashion show the following evening.
I had the fantastic opportunity recently to view the exhumation of a virtual mass grave at Cranfield University.
The opportunity came about after a meeting with Nicholas Marguez Grant to discuss the work I created for ‘Latent’. Nicholas works at Cranfield University as Lecturer in Forensic Anthropology with Roland Wessling who is Lecturer in Forensic Archaeology & Anthropology. Nicholas mentioned that Roland runs an annual module, for Masters forensic anthropology students. This module aims to give these students the experience of exhuming a mass grave in advance of a real one.
At least 6 months in advance plastic skeletons are buried in a pit within woodland within the grounds of Cranfield University, Shrivenham. Roland sets a series of stories and scenarios that the students need to discover and interpret within the placement of each skeleton. Tied hands, blindfolds and position can help to tell the story of what happened.
When I arrived, very little had been uncovered but the graves had been plotted and excavation had been started. It was fascinating to see the process of the work and I had the opportunity to talk to a few of the students.
Roland was very generous with his time and I had a long and fascinating conversation with him about the work he did exhuming graves in Bosnia. A fantastic insight with anecdotes and knowledge that it simply wouldn’t be possible to discover in books.
I have been particularly interested in the use of fabric and clothing to identify individuals within mass graves in Bosnia, but whilst talking with Roland he started to explain that during the trials similarities between the fabrics used for blindfolds and ligatures became apparent. These similarities helped to show that the atrocities had been organized and therefore constituted genocide rather than mass murder.
This nugget of information is enormously exciting for me and something I am now keen to try and research. I want to try and source visual imagery and descriptions of these blindfolds and ligatures.
Roland has kindly agreed to send me a transcript of the trial of Radislav Krstic which is where these discoveries were initially mentioned.
This day has been an amazing opportunity and an experience that has allowed me huge insights.
