Ashley Hemmings

My MFA thesis work, titled Tell Me How to Be Here, uses rug hooking to consider the multitude of ways that language influences our relationships with our environments. Specifically, my handmade hooked rugs compare and contrast texts collected from public municipal signage and my grandmother’s idioms leftover from her youth growing up on Nova Scotia farmland. With this work I am asking: How can signs be viewed as cultural utterances when considered alongside my grandmother’s phrases? And how do the messages behind both forms of language change when removed from their original contexts and represented through a domestic craft medium? Tell Me How to Be Here also considers material questions that pertain to craft processes as acts of political interventions, and the establishment of craft as a vehicle for the matrilineal transfer of knowledge. It is through the combination of these ideas, that this project has grown from a critical analysis of public signage, into an exploration of my family history with craft, and an archiving of information passed down to me from my grandmother.