Crafting Resistance: An Evening with Common Threads Press

Gill Crawshaw

Crawshaw is a curator who draws on her experience of disability activism to organise art exhibitions and events which highlight issues affecting disabled people. Crawshaw has curated exhibitions which have addressed representation of disabled artists (Possible All Along), charity (Piss on Pity), cuts to welfare and public spending (Shoddy) and access (The Reality of Small Differences). Crawshaw is interested in the intersection of disabled people’s lives with textile heritage in the north of England, as well as with contemporary textile arts. At the time of publication, Crawshaw is organising an exhibition that is part of Leeds 2023 Year of Culture. In Any work that wanted doing, disabled artists are invited to respond to Crawshaw’s research into disabled people who worked in textile mills.

Rachel Dedman

Dedman is a curator, writer, and art historian. Her work examines the material and political lives of things, and challenges established narratives around cultural production in the Global South. Since 2019, Dedman has been the Jameel Curator of Contemporary Art from the Middle East at the V&A, London, where she curates the triennial Jameel Prize exhibition and the Jameel Fellowship artist residency programme. Beyond the V&A, Rachel curated Material Power: Palestinian Embroidery for Kettle’s Yard and The Whitworth, UK, in 2023/24, and was co-curator of the State of Fashion Biennale 2024: Ties that Bind in Arnhem, the Netherlands.

Jess White

White is a culture writer based in Liverpool, who focuses on books, film and costume. Her work has featured in the Guardian, Dazed, i-D, the Faber Journal and The Irish Times, among others. She has recently completed a PhD which explores representations of textile labour and its products in nineteenth-century literature.

Laura Moseley

Moseley is the Founder of Common Threads Press and the Assistant Curator of the Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge.