Unfolding the Sarong: Batik Workshop | Glasgow Zine Library
Arts
Craft
This workshop engages with Southeast Asian sarongs as vessels for ancestral memory and cultural history. Drawing on their recent work, The Fingers Pulling The Thread (2024), artist Alaya Ang will take us through the forms and patterns of sarongs and Peranakan traditions to consider how gender, storytelling and resistance are explored through cloth. Sarongs invite us to explore gender beyond a binary as they carry distinct cultural and symbolic meanings across Southeast Asia, allowing for diverse gender expressions. The Bugis people of Sulawesi, for example, recognise five genders, and sarong styles shift accordingly; in performance traditions such as Wayang Peranakan, a Malay theatre form, the sarong moves between masculinity and femininity depending on how it is worn. Participants will learn about batik, a wax-resist dyeing technique, and get to use canting, a traditional pen-like tool to create their batik tulis (hand-drawn batik), developing individual motifs to inscribe personal and collective narratives onto cloth. You are encouraged to bring a piece of cloth that holds personal or familial significance for this workshop. This events programme is for young people aged 18–24 years old. While these workshops are intended for this age group, we are keen to be inclusive, and if you feel it would be particularly beneficial for you to attend, please contact our Learning Programme Manager, Rachel Prosser at rprosser@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk. All making supplies are provided free of charge and workshops are in-person only. All workshops are wheelchair accessible. Spaces at the workshops are limited to create intimate discussion and instruction during hands-on sessions. - Convenors: Gabe Beckhurstis an art historian and curator who teaches modern and contemporary art at University College London (UCL), with an emphasis on Feminist, Queer and Trans histories of photography, performance and artists’ moving images. Selected curatorial projects include the 8th Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2022, the co-curated exhibition Currency: Photography Beyond Capture at Deichtorhallen Hamburg–Halle für aktuelle Kunst, 2022 and Dig Where You Stand for the 57th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, 2018–2019. Their writing has been published by LUX, Modern Art Oxford, Copenhagen Contemporary, Another Gaze and in Sculpture Journal. Jess Bailey (she/her) is a lecturer for premodern art in the History of Art Department, University of Edinburgh. Her published research addresses the representation of disability and gendered violence. Before joining the University of Edinburgh, Jess was an associate lecturer in the History of Art Department at University College London where her research on medieval quilting was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship. Passionate about the wider accessibility of art history, Jess organises public art history programming through her projects such as “The People’s Quilting Bee” lectures with curator Sharbreon Plummer and quilt fundraisers for groups including Land in Our Names and True Colors United. She is the author of Many Hands Make a Quilt: Short Histories of Radical Quilting. She co-founded Within the Frame with quilter and historian Deb McGuire, a practice-based heritage research project for the preservation of hand quilting in a frame. - Collaborator: Alaya Ang is a Glasgow-based visual artist whose practice explores intersections between material memory, migration and colonial histories. Their practice consistently connects artistic research with collaboration and shared knowledge production. Recent exhibitions include The Fingers Pulling the Thread at Edinburgh Art Festival 2024, and Unravelled Gathering (The Rope) at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh and Mimosa House, London, (2024). As a curator, Alaya's practice engages with environmental concerns, collaborative knowledge production and community-led initiatives. During their tenure as associate curator at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, (2021–24), they initiated “Confluence”, a water-focused residency programme supported by the British Council’s International Collaboration Fund. - Image Credit: The Fingers Pulling The Thread, 2024. Photo courtesy of Alaya Ang.
Information Source: Paul Mellon Centre | eventbrite