Paper Title: Subversive Threads

This paper offers a critical reflection on Subversive Threads, a new body of creative research that mobilises textile-based practices as acts of disobedience and genderqueer activism in response to current corrosive politics and cultural uncertainty. Presented in the context of a solo exhibition at Outer Space Contemporary Art, Magadjin and the MELT Festival of Queer Arts and Culture in 2025, the project re-examines embroidery and stitching samplers, appliqué and protest banners — as urgent, resistant gestures for the future. Through genderqueer methodologies of making-as-doing, the work engages with the politics of materiality, language, and gesture to provoke, reveal, and contest cultural values in relation to gender diversity, equity and inclusion. The title of this project expands on the seminal text by Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch (1984), 40 years after its publication. Subversive Threads reclaims the form of the needlework sampler as a contemporary site of resistance and protest. With its historical associations of obedience, the stitching sampler is ripe for creative acts of disobedience – unpicking, unravelling, undoing. These material disruptions of normative gender codes transform ‘sampling’ into an act of both refusal and reclamation. In Subversive Threads disobedience becomes a generative force for reclaiming genderqueer politics and reimagining collective futures.