Tal Fitzpatrick and Melissa Spratt are both textile artists based on the Gold Coast. They met in 2023 while taking part in the INCUBATE* Residency at Placemakers* and shortly thereafter they were both accepted into the 2023 Generate GC program where their collaboration began. Since they have delivered 4 socially-engaged craft based projects including: ‘The City Speaks Softly’ presented by BLEACH* Arts Festival (2025); ‘Crafting for Climate’ supported by the City Gold Coast (2025); ‘Threads of Belonging’ presented by Everybody Now (2025) and ‘The City Speaks Softly’ presented by Somerset StoryFest (2025).
Each of these projects involved delivering participatory craft driven workshops that invited participants to learn new skills (finger knitting and embroidery), share their stories, connect with one another and work with the artists to co-create new work. These projects all had public outcomes, with the two iterations of ‘The City Speaks Softly’ being installed on street pole banners in multiple suburbs on the Gold Coast.
Driving all these projects is the artist's belief that art can help foster a strong sense of agency within individuals and create a sense of belonging within groups and that craft is a medium that makes people feel safe, seen and cared for.
Crafting for climate
The Crafting for Climate community quilt project was presented with support from The City of Gold Coast Climate Resilience and Sustainability Unit and the Arts and Culture Unit.
Inspired by the City’s Climate Resilience and Sustainability strategy this quilt is a vision for our city’s future co-created by 58 residence including lead artists Tal Fitzpatrick and Melissa Spratt. Created in late 2025 through a series of free community workshops delivered in Upper Coomera, Broadbeach and Coolangatta this quilt symbolises collective action and reminds us that today’s choices shape the city our children will inherit.
The workshops included a presentation by the Climate Resilience and Sustainability team, finger knitting sharing circles where participants spoke about their hopes and aspirations for the city's climate future, embroidery skills sharing and the creation of their own unique quilt square and a hands-on seed bomb making experience.
The finished quilt will be on display across Gold Coast Libraries throughout 2026.
Crafting for Climate Community Quilt (2025) 174cm x 194cm, made using repurposed denim, cotton, wool, organic bamboo wadding, wood dowel.
THE CITY SPEAKS SOFTLY
The City Speaks Softly (2023-2025) is a collaboration between artists Melissa Spratt and Tal Fitzpatrick that uses the comforting nature of textiles to explore how art can soften our experience of public space.
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 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.
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.
BLEACH* FESTIVAL
The City Speaks Softly (2025) by Tal Fitzpatrick and Melissa Spratt was presented by BLEACH* Festival 2025. This project was presented by BLEACH* and Experience Gold Coast through the EGC Art Fund and developed in support from Generate GC, a City of Gold Coast program through the Arts and Culture Unit.
Tal and Melissa created 5 textile banners for this project using text they gathered from the local community through a workshop they facilitated at the Broadbeach Community Centre during the development stage of this project.
The five banners were scanned, printed and installed on over 50 street poles around Broadbeach Cultural Precinct, Burleigh Esplanade, HOTA, Kurrawa Park and in Broadbeach for the duration of the 2025 BLEACH*Festival between the 31 July - 30 August 2025.
Photos by Scott Chrisman
Storyfest 2025
Tal Fitzpatrick and Melissa Spratt were invited to create a series of four street pole banners in collaboration with students ahead of the 2025 Somerset Storyfest Festival on the Gold Coast.
Students were invited to share their thoughts in response to the question 'if the city could speak, what would it say?' while also learning how to finger knit and creating small handcrafted gifts for sharing anonymously with total strangers. The four banners Tal and Melissa created as a response to this input were: "Our Stories Matter" "You Belong Here" "Kindness is a Gift" and "The City Speaks Softly".
Tal and Melissa also delivered two 'Crafting Kindness' workshops for students as part of the 2025 Somerset Storyfest program during which they taught the students to finger knit, had conversations about how kindness can be purposefully created and create a small gift for someone they cared for.
THREAD OF BELONGING
Threads of Belonging was been a community arts project created with women and girls from the Northern Gold Coast over 12 weeks in 2025 at the Ormeau Community Centre as part of Everybody NOW’s Artist-In-Place Program.
The Artist-In-Place Program aimed to activate and animate community centres across the Gold Coast with arts and cultural activity created in collaboration with local communities. The program aims to engergise public spaces with creativity and insert arts in the everyday lives of Gold Coasters.
Over this 12 week program Tal and Melissa worked with women from the local community to create three finger knitted artworks bearing text developed collectively to reflect the conversations about belonging had by the group. The project culminated in a community event hosted by Everybody NOW! with artist talks, finger knitting and connection.
These three artworks were displayed publicly at the Ormeau Community Centre and the Broadbeach Community Centre in 2025.
GENERATE GC
'The City Speaks Softly' was created by Tal and Melissa during their time in the Generate GC 2023/2024 cohort. Generate GC is an artist development program by the City of Gold Coast Arts and Culture Unit.
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. Participants learned to finger knit, had conversations in response to stimulus questions, did a communal brainstorm on butchers paper and gave individual written reflections in response to the question: if the city would speak what would it say? (some responses pictured below). The artists collected all this information and used it to create the 5 banners that were presented at BLEACH* Festival 2025.
As part of the development of 'The City Speaks Softly' Tal and Melissa also worked on a series of 5 miniature hand-embroidered textile banners presented on working miniature street pole lamps with finger knitted wraps. These were created with the assistance of ceramists Michelle Le Plastrier and electronic engineer Tom Fitzpatrick.