DETAILS
Ticketed
Shell Space
8 McIver St, Brunswick VIC, Australia
Curtains Of Co-creation is an event exploring embroidery as a collective and dialogical practice. It invites audiences to engage with textile-making through artist talks, hands-on workshops, and live stitching sessions that examine the intersections of labour, memory, and creative agency.
On Friday, 23 May (6–9 PM), the event opens with an artist talk where participating artists will share insights into their practice, reflecting on the relationship between industrial and collective modes of making. This session provides an opportunity to hear different perspectives on embroidery as a cultural and political practice. Tea will be served to the audience.
On Saturday, 24 May (10 AM–10 PM), participants can join one of three workshop sessions. These workshops will introduce mark-making exercises and embroidery techniques, encouraging dialogue on personal and collective identity through material engagements. Participants will contribute stitches, textures, and symbols in response to prompts on labour and memory. Throughout the day, conversations and making processes will be recorded through audio, video, and written reflections.
A live stitching component will take place, where the artist and participants will collaboratively weave their contributions into larger textile panels. This performative act highlights the passage of time and labour within the making process. The textile works created during the event will be photographed and archived as part of the final documentation.
This event is open to individuals with or without prior embroidery experience, offering a space for creative exploration and shared making.
Participants
Ritika Skand Vohra
Ritika Vohra is a Melbourne-based textile art practitioner pursuing her PhD in Fashion and Textiles from RMIT University. She explores embroidery as a decolonial process through phenomenological and material-led approaches to making. Her work challenges conventional fashion frameworks by decentralising the human in the making process and engaging with the circular economy through slow, embodied labour. Her work is an intersection of habitual gestures and creative disruptions using embroidery-making. She has over 14 years of professional and academic experience as a fashion and design practitioner. Her practice invites audiences to engage in sensory interactions and shared correspondences, emphasising textiles as an ecologically and culturally situated form of activism. She has presented her practice at various prestigious platforms, including the Sutr Santati Symposium at the Melbourne Museum, IFFTI, and the Critical Fashion Studies Conference. She has also exhibited at the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival and Brunswick Street Gallery and engaged in virtual residencies with First Site Gallery RMIT.