Redrawing craft: Archival sources and the mark in the work of artist Danica Maier

‘Stitch & Peacock’, the title of this recent exhibition by UK-based American artist Danica Maier, at The Collection and Usher Gallery, Lincoln, alludes equally to the craft, the imagery and the subversive messages hidden in her drawings for this show. The result of a seven month residency by Maier, the exhibition is the latest in a series of invitations to contemporary artists by curator Ashley Gallant to respond to objects held in the archives, as a means of presenting new perspectives on historic artefacts. Maier chose a Jacobean crewel work bedspread and a range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century samplers, and by making work in response to these fragile objects, develops a dialogue that allows her to repeat and refract the textiles through the lens of drawing, and to make critical comparisons and equivalences between the stitch, the pixel and the drawn mark. Through her juxtapositions and reworkings, she asks us to reflect on the social context of the original female makers; to speculate on their potentially supressed frustrations, and their subversive power. Her wider drawing practice also critically invokes notions of labour, craft and technology, through her mining of a variety of archives.