What She Joined Her Hands Around distills Monika Cvitanovic’s practice‑based PhD at UNSW Art & Design into a tactile inquiry where gesture, repair, and feminist material histories converge.
Rooted in her family’s textile lineage during Croatia’s shift from socialism to capitalism, the project reclaims stitching as an act of agency, elevating the undervalued labour of women. Through an autoethnographic embrace of sloppy stitching—alongside reversing, folding, staining, and piecing—Cvitanovic resists the essentialisation of textile work as ‘women’s work,’ instead framing stitching as embodied knowledge that threads together domestic care, ecological ethics, and the temporalities of artistic labour. The resulting works, including a collaboration with her mother, cultivate an aesthetics of care that moves between intimate domestic practices and the broader systemic forces shaping textile production.
In this exhibition, the materials carry histories in their fibres, whispering stories of hands that patched, mended, and made meaning from the everyday. The works gather these traces into luminous forms that feel both ancient and urgently contemporary. They ask you to slow down, to witness the beauty in what has been tended to, and to recognise repair as a form of resistance.
Hero image caption:
Monika Cvitanovic, Remediation VIII, 2023, tea stain, sewing thread, ribbon, panties and fabric offcuts on women’s shirt, 51 x 37 cm.
Additional images captions:
Monika Cvitanovic, Soft archive III, 2024-2025, textile-based artworks, inherited doilies and thread, 38 x 33 cm.
Monika Cvitanovic, Remediation III, 2022, turmeric and beetroot dye, bra lace and sewing thread on men’s shirt, 57 x 36 cm.
Monika Cvitanovic, Soft archive II, 2024-2025, textile-based artworks, inherited doilies and thread, 39 x 34 cm.
Monika Cvitanovic and Marija Cvitanovic, Threads of continuity I, detail, embroidery thread on handwoven linen, 138 x 71 cm.
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