Tal Fitzpatrick | Signs For Our Times:
23/03/2020 to 19/07/2020
“What a lot of my work looks to do is create spaces and amplify the voices of people who are doing the actual grassroots work of change-making. I believe that the point of accruing power is to give it away and so, whenever I can, I try to use my privileged position as an artist who can reach diverse audiences, to redirect that exposure to people who might not otherwise be given a platform in those spaces”.
Introduction
My name is Tal Fitzpatrick. I am an artist, craftivist, researcher, and disability support worker.
What did life look like before the pandemic?
Just before the pandemic, I received a City of Melbourne and Creative Victoria Grant to do a really exciting project called ‘Signs For Our Times’ with Next Wave Festival. The project was going to involve a series of eight public workshops delivered in collaboration with eight different charity/activist organizations. The plan was to make craftivist banners with members of the public and the workshops were going to happen at Brunswick Mechanics, with the finished works to be displayed in the city at Testing Grounds.
How did the pandemic impact ‘Signs For Our Times’?
We had to rethink and reimagine the project. As a craftivist I often work in collaboration with others as part of the actual making process… obviously Covid-19 restrictions meant that wasn't feasible.
What I ended up doing was making the banners myself and instead of having participatory workshops I connected directly with some of the organizations that were going to be part of the public workshops. These included the Pacific Climate Warriors, Youth Affairs Council Victoria, Minus 18 and Democracy In Colour. So four really amazing organizations whose values and work I am really passionate about!
I created a proforma to help them think about what their banner might say and what it might look like and what colors might be involved in it. Each one of the groups went away and had their own process of coming up with those. So some did it collaboratively within their organization using volunteers and people who worked with the organization to brainstorm and come up with what the banner said and the design. Then I went away and made the banners. We photographed them at Brunswick Mechanics and then shared them digitally as part of the festival, which ended up being a digital festival.
It still was a really successful project in my eyes because what a lot of my work looks to do, is create spaces and amplify the voices of people who are doing the actual grassroots work of change-making. I really believe that the point of accruing power is to give it away and so, whenever I can, as an artist, I try to use my privileged position as an artist who can reach to be in contact with diverse audiences, to redirect channel that exposure to people who might not otherwise be given a platform in those spaces. So that's what I tried to do through this project - and fortunately I was able to bring lots of people's attention to what these organizations were doing during the pandemic, which was really great.
When you were working with these organizations online, instead of face to face, How did your collaborative processes shift?
It still felt very collaborative because of the interactions I've had with each organization. They had very specific ideas about what they wanted their banner to be. So for example, the Pacific Climate Warriors gave me very detailed drawings about what their banner looked like. It featured a Tatau, which is a traditional tattoo design as part of it, and I had really interesting conversations with my collaborators at the Pacific Climate Warriors to get that right. The design also had a centerpiece that was a woven mat, and they gave me specific cultural information about how they weave these kinds of mats. So I used fabric and wove the mat according to those instructions to create the banner.
In the project, ‘Sign For Our Times’, you created a banner, ‘Your Worth Is Not Measured By Your Productivity’. Can you explain how you came up with this text?
Head of the workshops for the Signs For Our Times project with Next Wave, I created a banner out of scrap material from this really amazing organization called Twich Women’s Sewing, which is a South Sudanese women's sewing collective. They gave me a bunch of fabric offcuts, which I love so much. So I used a bunch of those to create a banner, which was going to be used as an example at the workshops, just to give people something to feel that bit of inspiration. I knew that the works were going to hang on the outside at Testing Grounds, which is quite close to some big thoroughfares that go into the city. So I thought it'd be a good space to talk about capitalism and productivity. After the pandemic hit I decided to include that banner as one of the banners that would be shared and to gift that banner to the Next Wave team. Interestingly, it took on this really different meaning as a result of the pandemic. All of a sudden our work lives changed so dramatically. People were either busier than they'd ever been before…(eg. essential workers) or they had to totally redesign their work-life so they could work from home while dealing with the stress of a pandemic (and for many also having kids in the house!) There was just so much going on for people and it was really stressful. So I feel like that reminder of that “your worth is not measured by your productivity” became even more poignant somehow in that context.
What was your greatest experience working with ‘Sign For Our Times’?
The funnest parts of my projects always are things that are totally unseen from the outside or are hard to capture and communicate, which is the flow-on effects of what comes out of the projects for people who participated in them. With this project specifically, the people who took part from the Pacific Climate Warriors, they found that process of using creativity as a lens to reflect on values, goals and key messaging so valuable, that they decided to replicate that process with a bunch of their members across the country. They're going to go forward in the next half of the year and work with different groups to create a whole bunch of banners within their own organizations on their own. That was something that was sparked out of the experience of taking part in my project, but will now have its own life that has nothing to do with me. That's something I'm really proud of.
Are there any projects you’re working on now?
Right now, Kate Just and I are doing the @covid19quilt project, which is a global digital quilt created on instagram using images that people have shared with us of what textile pieces they have been creating during the pandemic. As part of this project we are sharing their words about how their crafting has helped them deal with COVID 19. We've got over 300 contributions from 26 different countries in that project, which is ongoing at the moment. (NOTE- it is now 516 posts from 27 countries)
The project will be exhibited in a different contexts and we're also going to be writing about it. We'd like to ideally publish a book about the project not too far down the track.
When did Covid-19 Quilt start?
It started at the very beginning of August. Kate was my primary supervisor for my PhD, and we'd been involved in each other's projects over the years, but we hadn't done a project together. Kate reached out to me and said "we should do something"? We thought it would be of value to our community to create a place where we could share and collate those experiences which felt very isolated because we were all suddenly not allowed to touch or be around anyone else. We realized that there was a lot of shared experience in that, which is really what the quilt reflects.
Tal Fitzpatrick
Website: talfitzpatrick.com
Instagram: @talfitzpatrick
Signs For Our Times more info: Sign For Our Times (2020) Catalogue
talfitzpatrick.com/next-wave-2020
assemble.nextwave.org.au/projects/tal-fitzpatrick
Signs For Our Times collaborating organizations
Democracy In Colour: democracyincolour.org
Photo by Ella Sowinska, courtesy of Next Wave
Youth Affairs Council Victoria: yacvic.org.au
Photo by Ella Sowinska, courtesy of Next Wave
Pacific Climate Warriors: https://world.350.org/pacificwarriors
Photo by Ella Sowinska, courtesy of Next Wave
Minus 18: https://www.minus18.org.au
Photo by Ella Sowinska, courtesy of Next Wave
Next Wave: nextwave.org.au
Photo by Ella Sowinska, courtesy of Next Wave
Photos and interview by Simon Aubor. Photographed prior to the 2020 Flourish: Arts Recovery Grant