LABOUR AS RESOURCE
Textile Research by Liactuallee / Stitchpunk Studies
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This project investigates labour as a resource—an often-erased component of sustainability discourse. Environmental narratives frequently prioritize material sustainability, but rarely acknowledge the human bodies required to harvest, spin, dye, stitch, and ship those materials. The work asks: How can the labour of making be made visible?
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Using crochet and knitting, I developed tools that deposit pigment during the process of making: a charcoal-coated finger sock, a crochet hook combined with a watercolor brush, bead-based markers of bodily interruption. These devices produce textiles that record tension, gesture, and fatigue, functioning as embodied data. The stitch is no longer neutral—it becomes a trace of time passing through the body.
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Experiments in Stitchpunk, 2025
This research also challenges the idea of efficiency. Craft labour can operate in what queer and disability theorists call “crip time”—a temporal model that rejects capitalist productivity. Instead of measuring value by speed, craft work allows us to ask: What other units could register labour? Rest? Repetition? Emotional endurance?
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The project is informed by Marx’s writing on alienated labour—not as a rigid framework, but as a way to think about how labour can become separated from its maker. In industrial contexts this estrangement unfolds in multiple ways: when workers contribute only a fragment of a larger object they do not direct, or when the rhythms and relationships of work are controlled by external forces rather than the worker themselves. This research also engages contemporary critiques of craft economies. Scholars such as Michele Krugh describe how craft has become “highly individualized, flexible labour,” while Nicole Dawkins notes that many crafters must brand and sell their own identities to sustain their practice. These tensions sit alongside the work rather than defining it—they prompt a reconsideration of whose labour is visible, valued, or commodified.
By integrating coal dust—referencing masculinized industrial labour—into soft textile forms, the work also unsettles gendered divisions between “hard” and “soft” labour.
Stitchpunk does not hide labour. It stains it, marks it, insists it remains visible.
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Textile Artist-in-Resdience, September - December 2025
Sustainability by Design (SBYD.SPACE), Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen, Germany
Works presented at Museum Folkwang, Essen. ​
Images courtesy of SBYD.SPACE / Katharina Ley
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​​Working Period: 7 weeks (49 days)
Total Working Time: 60 hours 25 mins
Materials / Tools: unspun wool from Iceland, Left index stain sock (pastels), Pigment crochet hook (acrylic inks), polyfill, pinewood and steel nails.
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Pink: week one
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Light blue: week two
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Ultramarine blue: week three
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Violet: week four
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purple : week five
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Grey: week six
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Black: week seven
Method / Notes:
The sculpture tests pigment-marking devices over
an extended making period to see how they behave within a longer sculptural process. Daily stitching
and periodic colour changes were used to map accumulation and material response.
Observations / Reflections:
Making this piece became a space for reflection
and storytelling. The bulbous textile sits atop
a darkened pinewood base, split in two, with steel nails that rise and fall through the surface. The base functioned as a practical lesson, an attempt to embrace imperfection while making visible the small frustrations and labour of sustained handwork.
accompanied by video of process, and audio storytelling.
Thorns Plucked from Flesh, 2025
Sedimented Excavations, 2025
From the Stitchpunk Manifesto:
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“Making the invisible labor visible. Making visible the invisible seams that hold everything together, revealing the labor that sustains our existence.”
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This position rejects the fast-fashion industrial model—where workers
are anonymous, conditions are opaque, and production is extractive. Stitchpunk proposes instead that we name the human beings and human processes behind every object. The goal is not nostalgia for pre-industrial craft nor moral purity, but a shift in how value is assigned. When labour is visible, it becomes relational rather than disposable.
The world is built with hands and on the backs of labour. As stitchpunks, we should never forget the human effort embedded in every item we own.
During my three-month residency at Folkwang University, I collected a tapestryof experiences that continue to resonate with me. This zine encapsulates my journey, featuring research notes, personal narratives, quiet observations, and half-formed ideas that emerged along the way. It also includes a few peculiar objects that became small anchors for my thoughts. Together, these fragments reveal the evolving architecture of a practice that is constantly in motion and transformation.