Working class needlework, poster from The D'Oyley Show, 1979
Working class needlework, poster from The D'Oyley Show
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$350 AUD
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Screenprint, printed in colour inks, from multiple stencils.
Undesignated impression as issued.
79.0 ×
51.0cm sheet and board
Printed by members of the Earthworks Poster Collective at Sydney University.
Other impressions of this work are held in the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Queensland Art Gallery.
Board-mounted. Condition as is.
The Women's Domestic Needlework Group was a feminist art and research collective active in Sydney between c.1976 and 1980. This poster, which features the artist Vivienne Binns, is the last in a series of ten posters created for 'The D'oyley Show: an exhibition of women's domestic fancywork' at the legendary Watters Gallery. The posters were included in the exhibition, alongside an archive of over 700 pieces of needlework, representing the "creative work of ‘mainstream women, ‘ordinary’ women or ‘non-artists’".*
"In an era when needlework was still percieved by heavily stereotyped ideas or unoriginality, repetition and domestic submissiveness, a collective of women elevated [historical] domestic needlework of women to a status equal to art being made in the contemporary moment of the 1970s."*
These posters are often attributed to Marie McMahon (born 1953) and Frances Phoenix (1950–2017), the project coordinators. In fact, the posters were designed collaboratively by members of the collective. Founding members of the Women's Domestic Needlework Group included Phoenix, McMahon, Joan Grounds, Bernadette Krone, Kathy Letray, Patricia McDonald, Noela Taylor and Loretta Vieceli.
*Elizabeth Emery, 'Subversive stitches: Needlework as activism in Australian feminis art of the 1970S', in Everyday Revolutions, eds. Michelle Arrow and Angela Woollacott (ANU, 2019), p. 113.
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