A series of amplified stitchings to interrogate and reappropriate the white supremacist, domestic phenomena of pickaninny embroidery transfers/patterns. Pickaninny is a racist term used to describe black children since the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Racist caricatures of black children have been found in advertising for a plethora of household items and consumables since the 19th century and as recently as the 1980s, particularly in Europe.
The aim of this project is to create a visual archive that deconstructs the anachronistic-pathological idealization of pickaninny embroidery patterns as representative of an 'innocent' past. I would like to create a stitching archive to interrupt the performative naivety around the existence of white supremacy while also dis-articulating pickaninny embroideries by re-appropriating them in my own stitching practice. I want to re-articulate them as examples of the pervasive sinisterness that often lurks beneath seemingly cute/domestic things. These offensive embroideries are intentionally dismissed in multitude: as something from an innocent past, as exempt from critique in the name of nostalgia and preservation, and as kitschness being exempt from offensiveness.
The archive recordings will be edited into a short video loop/projection with the jarring, disrupting, disturbing soundscape of amplified stitching as well as the finished stitchings sewn together in potential installation.
