Paperwork and Patchwork navigates immigration form technologies, alongside collaborative quilt-making with families affected by the Hostile Environment in the UK.
How do we "create narratives with a needle instead of a pen, dye rather than ink, cloth in place of paper" (Prain, 2014)?
This exhibition emerges from a doctoral research project involved with two methods; firstly following the paperwork of filling in immigration forms and, secondly devising experiments with quilt-making as a creative and collaborative method for studying the experiences of family migration in the UK. Developed in partnership with a grassroots migrant organisation, the 'Stitched with Love' quilt project brings together diverse stories of love, belonging, separation, and borders. Each quilt panel serves as a tactile, material form of storytelling and offers an alternative texture to the bureaucratic framings through which migration is often represented.
Grounded in participatory action research, the project draws on live sociology (Back, 2007; Back and Puwar, 2012), as well as new materialist theories (Barrett and Bolt, 2012; Bennett, 2010) it explores how creative practices can reimagine research methods and publics. Quilt-making is both method and mode of creative public sociology: a craft practice that is multisensory and affective, inviting audiences to encounter migration stories through touch, texture, and visual form. By situating quilts alongside forms, the exhibition explores broader questions of intimacy, borders, and belonging, as well as how craft can intervene in dominant depictions of migration.
This practice-led research project, conducted and curated by Phavine Phung, a PhD candidate in visual sociology. For more info on the project: stitchedwithlovequilt.wordpress.com
The exhibition is situated in the Kingsway Corridor, Goldsmiths University of London. Enter the Richard Hoggart Building, the corridor is at the back of the building, close to the green.
