The Sinai Stories and The Red Dress Event was a collaborative exhibition and film screening; it included the people who were the filmmakers from the Sinai and the Red Dress charity to showcase being able to create art without using voices.
The Red Dress is a project run by Kirstie Macleod, curated by 51 countries. They take small red fabric panels and get women who are vulnerable or live in poverty to tell their story through embroidery. In total, there have been 380 embroiderers. This was started in 2009. The Red Dress project partnered with the filmmakers from the Sinai and the Bedouin women to showcase the vulnerable women telling their story through embroidery and film, as well as needle felting craft and being able to connect different art disciplines.
It was very inspirational seeing all the work and the hand embroidery, as well as the films. The day itself started with a workshop to make hand felted stop motion animation, making small films like the ones we would see later. The films they showed were a representation of their culture with traditional and generational stories without words, focused on sharing the skill of needle felting and learning film. It was something that was important to them, and, understanding from the panel discussion and seeing one of the Bedouin women have their shop there to sell what she and her team had made, really helped me to get a perspective on how hard they work on their craft to show. The films were made by using felt and there was some work that included the women, but their faces were not allowed to be shown for their own cultural reasons.
Skills that we learned that day were needle felting, as they were running a workshop, and that led me to work on needle felt for the initial stages of my project. This is a quick, simple skill to learn and develop into something else. This needle felting workshop was so helpful for learning stop motion animation and getting a feel of being able to do it fast and from a beginner level. It was filmed with an iPhone and a free animation app; the sets were one of the backdrops from the films. The exhibition we saw throughout the day was the one I helped to set up. Being able to walk around and think about the process I had to go through to set it up with the team gave me a new appreciation of the hard work and dedication it takes to curate an exhibition.
On the day of setup, I was asked to move all the equipment and help the team curating the exhibition to move things to where they felt they should go. I was asked to put some boxes together (quite challenging) and had to source some more materials to build them. I would take any task given to me, as it was an amazing learning experience, and to be able to see all this hard work from different art disciplines was special.
Memorable moments I had while helping would have to be meeting the team who worked on the films and meeting Mai. Learning about Mai’s life as a teacher and how she got into the role of helping with the films was really interesting – and I’ll always remember me and Mai trying to put the boxes together. Helping with the exhibition was a really nice environment to be in.
Engaging with these experiences while at university is extremely valuable and has been helpful within my studies too. I found it to be a really useful experience, coming from a very tactile approach of making, and seeing the whole experience really gave me an appreciation and perspective into how much work goes into curating and the story within an exhibition. I have my own personal ideas for what I do within my day-to-day studio work, but when communicating to make it into an exhibition, the curators have their own perspective, and sometimes different thought processes as to how they would achieve it. I would definitely want to help out with other events, as this was a really valuable and eye-opening experience. I got to know other artists, learn about different cultures, and was able to experience working as a team as a newer artist.
On the day, I learned so much and networked with lots of experienced artists, and learned some stop motion animation, which was really fun as I could see what they do in other courses. Learning needle felting was so important for the future of my project at university as it was something I had not really thought of using before.
