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I created the 'Hope' and 'Safe' banners in 2013 and 2014 in the UK and also in Melbourne. I had just finished my PhD, which was a 3-year project investigating skin as a subjective texture in female narratives, and it involved a really deep period of research and solo practice, and so I was coming out of that having a really strong desire to engage the community in projects and also to address real-world social change issues. The work responded to stories of violence against women which were prevalent in the media at the time. It felt like there were an incessant barrage of stories about women who had been murdered or assaulted both in public and in private spaces. And in Melbourne, where I'm living, there had been two recent cases - one, Tracey Connelly, a woman in my local St Kilda area, and, not long after, Jill Meagher from Brunswick, Victoria, which was a very famous case or murder, in which case many people all across our city responded in vigils, filling the streets with people who were responding to the distress caused by the loss of so many women due to violence. I remember one day I was jogging in my local neighbourhood around this time and I had tears just streaming down my face, feeling like we're still here, we're still in that time where we aren't safe in our own neighbourhoods and in our own homes, and so I decided to make a series of banners, banner projects, which addressed that sense of wanting to have safety, hope and agency in our own homes and in public space, and I wanted to make those works with communities of other women to reclaim our streets, reclaim our communities, reclaim our relationship to the world that we live in in an empowered way.

The materials that the 'Hope' and then 'Safe' banners are made   from is a durable builder’s line. It's a construction material used to draw out safety lines across a site so that people don't walk into areas they're not meant to walk into, and also a retroreflective silver fabric, the type that appears on cyclists' vests or other, you know, WorkSafe uniforms. So, what I was thinking about with those materials was a way of incorporating urban fabrics that denote safety or visibility into the banners themselves. So, the 'Hope' banner was also a fluoro yellow because I was thinking of it as a sign that's very illuminated and projects itself out into public space as a kind of glowing light and that glows in the dark, and when photographed with a flash that is a glowing sign. And I felt that the 'Hope' banner should be this fluorescent tone because it was meant to interact with people in a way where they felt also of it as a sign to follow or to, you know, almost to follow instructions. Just like a stop sign, the 'Hope' sign is instructing people that it's OK to hope.

And part of the banners' making was that there were workshops where we constructed them in public and we constructed them in knitting workshops at knitting stores, in public spaces like libraries, outdoor spaces. And the call-out for these forms of participation was on the internet, on Facebook pages, online, and also just through public local council notices. So that was a way of getting people of all age groups as well, people who use local services, like the elderly, for example, who would participate, weren't really online, but through library and other channels we were able to reach them as well. In both banner projects, we had over 70 people participate in different workshop settings and people were given the opportunity to knit a square and they could knit it in any pattern they wanted. So it was a way of burying the thoughts and skills and, I guess, signatures of almost every one of the makers into the banner even though it was knitted or crocheted in the same colour overall. And then the letters were knitted in those retroreflective silver strips. And it was actually tricky to get that yarn. I had to get a safety company to help me to cut it into yarn because it isn't usually used for knitting. So, it was difficult to knit with.  And after the knitting workshops that were held, I pieced the banners together myself and then a series of different walks were held with the banners.

And when we walked the 'Hope' banner out in public in places such as Leeds, people really did interact with it. They would ask, they would call out to a group of us holding the banner from across the street and say, "What are you hoping for?" And we would answer, "What are YOU hoping for?" And people would tell us, so it had that way of reaching beyond the initial idea to talk about women's safety in public space and created a situation where groups of mainly women were seen as having this agency in public space through the work to interact with people in a way that was really positive and, I guess, powerful. When I returned from the UK, there was a little bit of time passed and I felt like there needed to be a second banner, the 'Safe' banner. And I chose the black tone of the 'Safe' banner because I was thinking of that banner as a bit like a shield or a protective barrier. I wanted through the second work to really acknowledge the losses of so many women, particularly in my local area that I had myself and many in our community had been grieving. So the word 'safe' became also a hope and a wish for what we want. We want women to have safety, but it was also denoting the fact that safety had not been granted and many women were not feeling safe in public still, and still don't, safe in public or their homes. So both the photographic works, the large-scale photographic works, were documents or relics of the walks that were taken in public.

So, the 'Safe' walk photo is in Melbourne and the 'Hope' walk photograph is in Leeds. But there were many photographs taken with the banners in different locations. And, I guess, the interesting thing about the walks was that it wasn't necessarily the makers who took the walks. It was another group of people who wanted to participate. So, different parts of the project engaged different people. Sometimes both the knitters would walk. But it was an open project that continued to invite people in to have discussions about what the work was about and what it hoped to do. Both works, the 'Hope' and 'Safe' banners were acquired by the Wangaratta Art Gallery after I won the Wangaratta art prize, which is a textile prize, in 2000...I believe it was 2015 for the 'Safe' banner. So, they acquired both banners and I gifted them the photographs so that the works are all held in one collection.

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