Tag Archives: criminology

Making Meaning Podcast Episode 24 Highlights from Making Meaning Live.

Posted in career, creative business, podcast by

Making Meaning Live was a fantastic online event which I created and hosted in July 2022. The event brought together creative people to talk about the meaning behind what they make with a live audience. This episode includes Ruth Singer in conversation with Maker Membership participants talking about their research and reflection process. The second part is a discussion between Ruth Singer and researcher Charlotte Bilby about working with women in the criminal justice system. There’s also an extended introduction talking about two of the sessions which, although brilliant, aren’t included – one because it was so visual that it just doesn’t work on a podcast and one which wasn’t recorded on the request of the speaker. Those presenters were Sharon Adams who you can hear on Episode 14 and the other was Lucille Junkere – find her website here.

You can also watch the rest of the event recordings for free here including Sharon’s drawing activity.

Play here

Charlotte Bilby
Ruth’s Words About Women project
Maker Membership

Session descriptions

Maker Membership : Research and Reflection

Maker Membership is Ruth Singer’s group for creative people who want to build more research and meaning into their making. Members will join Ruth in a discussion and share their work, focussing on the research they do and the reflection work guided by Ruth that has helped them develop their own creative practices.

Maker Membership is Ruth Singer’s group for all creative people who want to build more research, meaning and reflection into their work. It is open to anyone who makes and we are a sociable community from around the world. You don’t have to be a professional maker (though you are welcome if you are) and you don’t have to work in textiles, there is a wide range of other practices involved in the group. Ruth produces resources, workbooks and blog posts to inspire you to think about your making practice and we meet monthly on Zoom for group mentoring and sharing our work.

Members sharing their work in this session include Alison, Marianda, Amy, Ann and Julie

Ruth Singer & Charlotte Bilby, Labelling Ourselves
Charlotte will give an illustrated talk about two creative projects; ‘Free but not free’ in a community probation setting, and her current work, ‘Keeping in touch’. This project asks women in prison and women outside the prison community to make small mixed- media objects. One of these is a label that explores aspects of their identity. She will explain the processes and reasons for working with criminalised women, show some examples of the outputs and discuss the impact of the work on participants. Charlotte and Ruth will consider the differences and similarities in the work that they have done in exploring the stories of criminalised women over a century apart. While they are chatting, you will be encouraged to think about what you would include on your own label.

Charlotte researches creativity and making in criminal justice systems. She used to work in university criminology departments, where she taught about punishment and rehabilitation and did policy evaluations for the government. She became interested in how creative activities could change prisoners’ behaviour and identities, and incorporated making activities into her research. She is now based in Northumbria University’s School of Design, where she is running a mixed-media making project with women in and outside prison. The pieces explore (changing) identities, relationships with emotionally important people and whether our environments have an impact on the things we make.

Maker Membership

My Maker Membership is now open for all makers wanting to explore their motivations and to build meaning and research into their practice and be part of a supportive creative community. We meet once a month and I share resources, tips and research to help you develop your own work. Find out more here.

New Edition of Criminal Quilts Book

Posted in Books, career, Criminal Quilts by

Two years ago I created Criminal Quilts exhibition and self-published the accompanying book, alongside each other. Looking back, I am not sure how I managed to do both in a few short months as well as my other work. But somehow I did. It’s has taken a couple of years for the first print run of the book to sell out so I have revised and reprinted this year. The new version has a couple of extra pages and some new images as well as (hopefully) no more page reference errors!

The first print run was only ever sold directly by me online, at events and alongside the exhibition in gallery shops. The new version has an ISBN number and is already listed on Amazon and I will be selling wholesale to bookshops too. Self-publishing allows me total control of the book production and sales. Both editions are printed on recycled paper with no plastic coating of the cover, for maximum sustainability. This has cost me more but fits with my values. It is also printed by a small (female-owned) local company, a few minutes from my house so I can walk to the printers to check things. My brilliant graphic designer Sophie has done a great job as always. The downsides of self-publishing are that all the copies have to be stored in my (small, already crowded) house! Please help me make space to move by purchasing a copy (or 10) of this book.

It’s been an amazing couple of years with this book. The best part of being both author and publisher is that I know exactly where this book has been sent. It has travelled all over the world which amazes and delights me. It has been devoured by textile enthusiasts, criminologists, historians, Stafford residents, prison, probation and community work professionals, schools, photographers, universities and academics. It’s been reviewed in an academic publication too as well as in textile press.

The back cover blurb reads:

Criminal Quilts is an art & heritage project created by artist Ruth Singer which explores the stories of women photographed in Stafford Prison 1877-1916. This book covers the research which Ruth and a team of volunteers undertook in the development of the project, including many of the personal stories of women in the archives of Stafford Prison.
It also covers additional research around clothing in the photographs as well as daily life in a Victorian prison.

This book is also a catalogue of the textiles pieces which Ruth has created alongside her research, giving the full background from the initial commission in 2012 to the work created in 2018 for the touring exhibition. This is a revised edition for 2020.

Ruth Singer is an established British textile artist with a background working in the museum sector. Her training and first career continue to influence her artistic practice through her interest in heritage, narrative, material culture and society. Ruth’s work is focussed on research and personal exploration of stories, resulting in subtle, emotive and sensitive work. She creates exhibitions, commissions, community projects and undertakes artist residencies to explore subjects and places in detail. She has presented a number of solo exhibitions as well as Criminal Quilts and was awarded the Fine Art Quilt Masters Prize in 2016, and written several books. She also works as a consultant, artist mentor and tutor.

Criminal Quilts talk

Posted in Criminal Quilts, talks by

Textiles Inspired by Women Photographed in Stafford Prison 1877-1916.

Friday 24th July 2020 
4-5.30pm BST

In this talk, I will look at the background to this project which I started in 2012, creating textiles about the stories of Victorian and Edwardian women prisoners. As well as showing the textile artworks from the touring exhibition, I will also share some of the historical research which the volunteer team and I put together, including case studies of several women and my own research into prison clothing visible in the photographs.

This talk will be live on Zoom with a recording available afterwards. You will be able to ask questions. Book here.

Criminal Quilts exhibition pop up in London

Posted in Criminal Quilts, Exhibitions, My work by

One 2nd & 3rd November 2019, my Criminal Quilts exhibition will appear for ONE WEEKEND ONLY at Gunnersbury Park Museum, West London. I will also be giving a talk / tour of the exhibition on the Saturday at 2pm. Tickets are £10 available from Gunnersbury website.

 

 

Criminal Quilts new exhibition

Posted in Criminal Quilts, Exhibitions, My work by

Criminal Quilts exhibition returns to Staffordshire from 25th May – 7th July at The Brampton Museum and Art Gallery, Newcastle-under-Lyme. The museum is free entry and is open Monday to Saturday – 10am to 5.30pm, Sunday – 2pm to 5.30pm, Bank Holidays 2pm – 5.30pm.

I will be giving a talk and tour at the museum on Wednesday 3rd July at 2pm.

 

This exhibition also includes the original criminal Quilts miniature pieces made for Staffordshire Arts and Museums service plus the new Prison Apron shown below.

 

Suffrage Exhibition at Llantarnam Grange Art Centre

Posted in Criminal Quilts, Exhibitions, History, My work by

Suffrage is a new exhibition at Llantarnam Grange Art Centre focusing on textile art and political expression to mark the Centenary of Women’s Suffrage. I am one of the exhibiting makers alongside Morwenna Catt, Eleanor Edwardes, Caren Garfen, Rozanne Hawklsey and Sue Shields. The exhibition opens Saturday 6th October 2018.

My piece, Prison Apron,  explores the prison sentences of suffragettes, expressed through stitch. Over the last year I have been reading accounts of suffragettes in prison for my project Criminal Quilts and considering the bravery of those women who knew their actions would inevitably lead to prison sentences. Over 1000 people, mostly women, were imprisoned for criminal activity related to suffrage campaigning in the early 20th century. You can also find out more about the exhibition in the online catalogue. I will be at the exhibition preview on Saturday 6th October in conversation with the curator and other artists. I am also running a professional development day for makers at the gallery on 20th October. The exhibition continues until 17th November 2018. 

Recently, I have become very interested in using data as a way of telling a story. For me, using data allows me to step back from the personal story and away from the more obvious interpretations to find a new route into the narrative I am exploring. I have chosen to work with prison sentence data to create this piece, looking at sentence records of women including the famous Pankhursts, Alice Hawkins from my home town of Leicester and Welsh women including Lady Rhondda and lesser-known Kate Evans. 

The apron is an antique piece, selected for its similarity to those seen in prison photographs and descriptions I have read in documents. Prison clothing was marked with painted-on arrows to show the items belonged to the government. Rather than paint on these arrows, I have hand stitched them on using threads in shades of grey. 

I have taken a series of prison sentences imposed upon suffragettes, ranging from 7 days to 9 months as the starting point for this work and created arrows using one stitch per day in prison. Each sentence is a different thread. One of the arrows is made up of 270 stitches of a single 9 month prison sentence, while the others are made up of numerous shorter sentences served by different women. 

The stitch is hand embroidered chain stitch, a symbolic choice, where each single stitch forms a connected chain which completes the whole. There are a total of almost 1000 individual stitches in this piece,  representing the 1000 individuals sent to prison. Hand stitching, and the slow, careful work it involves, reflects the time spent in prison doing repetitive labour including needlework. 

 

 

Llantarnam Grange Art Centre

St David’s Road
Cwmbran
Torfaen  NP44 1PD
Tel: 01633 483321
Email: info@lgac.org.uk

Opening Times

Monday to Friday 9.30am – 5pm
(Closed Bank Holiday Mondays)
Saturday 9.30am – 4pm
Admission is free

Criminal Quilts : Sketchbooks

Posted in Criminal Quilts, History, Inspiration, Narrative Threads, Residencies by

In between archive visits I have begun working on a sketchbook to gather my thoughts and ideas for the new work I intended to make for the Criminal Quilts exhibitions starting in summer 2018 – which is suddenly really quite soon!
I’ve created a sketchbook for sharing with people when I do talks about the project and during archive workshops starting in January. It is very much a working sketchbook; a gathering of ideas, inspiration, notes, thoughts, colours, textures and details but it is also intended to be shared, used and probably included in exhibitions so I have taken care to make it look really nice!

I’m working in a large format spiral bound sketchbook with brown kraft paper pages which is robust, easy to display, has capacity for expansion and the colour fits with the project. As I discussed in a previous post, I am finding the photo albums themselves very inspiring – the layers of papers, the damaged leather bindings and the marbled endpapers which feel like a little incongruous in their luxurious feel.

I’m also working on colour palettes to bring through the work, much of it inspired by sepia photos, cyanotype prints and my early pieces taking colours from the Shire Hall court buildings themselves and most recently I have been working on ways of creatively interpreting the data which the research is uncovering.  My next post will explore the growing data collection in more detail.

You can keep up to date with the project on Twitter @criminalquilts or on my personal Instagram feed (which also includes a lot more besides!)

Criminal Quilts research blog : photo albums. 

Posted in Criminal Quilts, History, Inspiration, My work, Residencies by

The photographs which have formed the source material for Criminal Quilts are held in bound albums in Staffordshire Record Office. The albums are part of a large collection of archives from Stafford Prison and I’ve been working my way through each one in the last couple of weeks. The images I am working with date from 1878-1915.

As well as the intriguing photographs of women, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the albums themselves. They are large bound books with hundreds of pages. Some have damaged spines showing the binding. Some covers are badly damaged too, showing layers of leather and board.

The albums have marbled endpapers and indexed pages, buckled pages and damaged corners. The materiality and weight of these albums adds another dimension to the stories of the women whose images are contained within. 

I am hoping to bring in the physicality of the albums into the new work in make as the project develops, in the form of artist-made books with hand printed and stitched pages.

 

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Criminal Quilts research – October 2017

Posted in Criminal Quilts, My work, Residencies by

The research and development phase of Criminal Quilts is now well underway. I have been spending time in residence at Staffordshire Record Office exploring archives and finding out what resources I have to explore during this project and planning what the workshops for volunteers and participants will involve.

Stafford Prison photograph albums from the late 19th and early 20th century form the basis of the entire project. For several years I have been creating work around a handful of photographs of women with no additional information about them at all. One of the aims of this new funded research project is to explore the full collection of photograph albums and trace stories through the records.

There are 10 different albums dating from 1877 to 1915 which gives me a broad window of exploration beyond the Victorian and well into the 21st century. I have begun by cataloguing the women who appear in the photographs. The albums just contain photos, and in a couple of cases, indexed pages of named but very little detail. Each image is marked with the prisoner’s name, a date (of photograph, I assume) and a number. In this first phase I am making lists of all the women (about 10-15% of the total in each album I estimate) and noting name, date, number, approximate age and a detailed description of the photograph. I’ll then be able to cross reference between the albums to see who features more than once and then find out more about them via the written documents which I have yet to explore.

Already I can see women who appear several times over the years. I have identified prison uniforms and what I suspect is prison-issue clothing. There’s also a very clear timeline of fashion, particularly in hats which almost all of the women are wearing. These photographs are known to be a rare record of working class women’s clothing but I am already realising it is going to be difficult to be sure what is prison issue and what is personal property, particularly in the later images. There are also some really lovely shawls appearing which may well inspired new work.

I have a lot of additional research to do about the background to prison identification photography, about prison uniforms and a lot of cross referencing to fashion history in general before I can draw any conclusions about what their clothing says.

The albums themselves are impressive and inspiring objects with marbled endpapers, damaged spines and hand written text. I’ll be exploring the albums in more detail in the next post.

 

There are still spaces for volunteers to work with me on this project during 2018. Find out more here.

Criminal Quilts exhibition is available for touring in 2019 onwards.

Images of archive material courtesy of Staffordshire Record Office. Project funded by Arts Council England with Staffordshire County Council.

 

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