IF THE CITY COULD SPEAK WHAT WOULD IT SAY?
The 'City Speaks Softly' is a collaboration between Melissa Spratt and Tal Fitzpatrick that uses the comforting nature of textiles to explore how art can soften our experience of public space. The built environment can be overwhelming and at times feel unsafe. This project seeks to shed light on how art might create moments of gentle sensorial reprieve and to explore the potential to gently surprise audiences.
This socially engaged project seeks to shed light on how art might create moments of gentle sensorial reprieve. Utilising street pole banners as a broadly accessible site for a creative intervention with the potential to gently surprise audiences.
The project combines Tal's appliqué textile practice with Melissa's finger-knitting to create banners that can be displayed on street pole banners. These text driven banners are created in conversation with community thought the process of a facilitated workshop that involves conversations and craft-based skills sharing.
Exploring the narrative idea of finding the city’s voice, the project considers who gets to speak into public spaces and plays with the potential of giving the city a voice that centres softness, kindness, femininity, accessibility and inclusion.
This project has the potential to bring together diverse communities and create a soft space for open conversations about complex local, social, personal and political issues. With the goal of creating public artworks (in the form of street pole banners) that speak to these issues and reflect back a community’s concerns and aspirations thought the display of the banners on street poles.
PROJECT DEVELOPMENT
Over the 6months development phase of this project, Melissa and Tal worked on the text for 5 banners based on their own experiences, reflections and conversations about public space on the Gold Coast. Using this text, they created one original banner using finger knitting and applique techniques and had this artwork professionally scanned ready for printing at scale. They also worked on a series of 5 miniature working streetlamps with hand embroidered banners and finger knitted wraps for the street poles. These were created with the assitance of ceramic artist Michelle Le Plastrier and electronic engineer Tom Fitzpatrick.
A major part of the project development involved Melissa and Tal delivering a test workshop that brought together 22 community members for tea, finger knitting, conversation and reflection about their thoughts on the city. This workshop was documented by photographer and artist Ellamay Fitzgerald and the written material collected from this workshop (including the communal brainstorm on butchers paper and the participant’s individual written reflections in response to a question about what the city would say if it could speak) was collected for use in further development of this project.
Images by Ellamay Fitzgerald