The Quilty Quilt

The Quilty Quilt, 2017

Hand-dyed cotton, cardboard and cotton thread, dimensions variable.

This work explores gender inequality in the arts by playfully responding to a painting by the famous Australian male artist Ben Quilty. The painting is pixelated and then reproduced with the traditional technique of hand-stitched paper-pieced quilting – a highly skilled, creative and incredibly time-consuming process that is nonetheless treated as a lesser ‘craft.’

While most quilters are women, the few very commercially successful artists who use this technique tend to be men. This mirrors the enormous over-representation of male artists in the collections of major arts institutions.

The colours in this quilt are matched to the original painting by hand dyeing and overdyeing cotton in small batches with various materials including black tea, pomegranate, orange leaves, eucalyptus leaves, indigo, iron, copper and madder.