Vanessa is a principal lecturer, artist and designer based in East Sussex. She has taught art and design for the past decade and is currently Course Leader at the University of Brighton for their successful BA (hons) Design for Digital Media course, also teaching into BA Animation and BA Games Art & Design.
She is particularly interested in the domestic and feminine origins of fairy tales and the opportunity that these narratives hold to reflect the lives of modern women. Her ongoing practice-based collaborative arts project, Women & Domesticity – What’s your Perspective? references traditional ‘women’s work’ and invites people to embroider their own perspectives and experiences of domesticity onto a duster.
Vanessa’s 10 year long collaborative arts project on display as part of Tangled Up, Women & Domesticity – What’s your Perspective?, explores contemporary perspectives on the everyday lives of women. Through an open call, participants are invited to embroider their domestic thoughts, feelings, complaints, and celebrations as words or images onto a yellow duster. Each duster is unique and hand-stitched, transforming it from cleaning cloth to craftivist act. The ever-growing collection includes hundreds of dusters that have been exhibited and presented widely in community, creative and academic contexts across the UK, mainland Europe, and Florida, USA.
Dusters were selected for embroidery and display as a metaphor for domesticity because they are mundane (like most domestic tasks), yet visually appealing in their brilliant bright yellow. This practice asks how hidden and silenced female domestic experiences can be voiced through collective craft practice, and explores how the duster, which signifies domesticity through our cultural knowledge of its purpose as a cleaning cloth, can act as a catalyst for change through collective making. Vanessa regularly promotes this work through exhibition in arts venues, community workshops, and academic publication.
Throughout the course of Tangled Up, we will encourage our visitors and supporters to get involved in the project, by embroidering their own duster and attending a special talk and workshop by Vanessa during our Threads Textile Festival in June. Check back soon for more details and tickets!
