Alia Hamaoui, Steph Huang, Emily Moore, Ulgen Semerci, Lara Smithson, Holly Stevenson, Olivia Strange, Serra Tansel, Sophie Vallance Cantor, Jessica Wetherly.

 

Staffordshire St presents the Carrier Bag Collective inviting 10 artists to reflect on the idea of the collective and containment inspired by Ursula Le Guin’s seminal text Carrier Bag Theory. 

​

Born from a series of weekly zoom meetings by the curators during the pandemic where these womxn discussed personal histories and experiences of womxnhood. A collective was formed as means of survival and space for sharing and processing- a modern day campfire with the absence of heroes and violent battles won but rather a messy and intertwined collection of stories about struggle and survival. An endeavour grounded in collective healing and opening the conversation out to a wider group of artists to explore more stories of our shared realities.

​

The title of the show takes the words directly from Ursula Le Guinn’s text ‘Bag, Pedestal, Rabbit, Potato’ which speaks to the long standing patriarchal narrative of heroes and hierarchy - in Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of fiction all things are equal, an intertwined cosmos of things that are leaky, undecided/indecisive and disordered. It de-privileges the spear and penetrative acts of violence to make way for a landscape of storytelling and sharing. A vessel for collective healing that prioritises gathering and holding over domination and binary thinking around themes of identity, existence and survival.

​

For more information click here.

​

Photography by George Baggaley

​