CURRICULUM VITAE
Fine-art textile Practitioner | Educator | Researcher
Mona is a fine artist, crafting experiential installations and prints by integrating drawing, printmaking and stitching with paper, thread and light. These spatial interpretations and prints emphasise cloth traces and a fragility and fragmentation found in “in-between” liminal cultural spaces.
The ingrained legacy of European colonisation and the experience of living in a postcolonial nation influence her work.
Resume
Mona Craven is a PhD candidate at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham. Her practice-based research focuses on the material culture of a whitework embroidered gown and an indigo resist-print cloth. Both cloths share complex colonial and postcolonial histories. Investigating the entangled and common threads set between both cloths with practice-based research methods, draw attention to a cultural dislocation. Installations, formed with paper, cloth, thread, and photogravure prints, create spatial encounters. These interpretive outcomes are set in the between spaces of the here and now, to form new readings of both cloths.
Her practice includes facilitating research-led creative response in the arts, museums and education sector. Mona offers a broad art and design skills-base with a resourceful,thorough approach to tasks. Her work draws from a substantive career as a design-director and creative arts educator.
Qualifications
2015 – 2017
MA Textiles, Post-Graduate School of Craft and Design (Distinction)
University for the Creative Arts
Post-Graduate Higher Education Diploma, Rhodes University, South Africa
Bachelor of Fine Arts, Rhodes University, South Africa
Fine Art Studies, Port Elizabeth Technikon, South Africa
Professional Development
Thinking Teaching, University of the Arts London
Photogravure, University of West England
MOMA Art & Enquiry and Museum Teaching Strategies, Coursera
The Secret Power of Brands, FutureLearn
A Crash Course on Creativity – Tina Seelig, Coursera
Object Photography, London School of Photography
Portrait Photography, University of the Arts London
Member: ACID, Museum Association
Linked in
Exhibitions and Publications
Exhibitions
Sept-Oct 2022
About Time, Group exhibition, The Gallery at Grande Provence, South Africa
June 2022
Pins, Places, Cloth, Installation, Surrey Artists Open Studio’s 2022, Little Acres Studio’s, Rowledge
Oct-Nov 2021
Practice-as-Research, Work-in-Progress, Group Exhibition, Foyer Gallery, UCA, Farnham
Sept 2021
Continiuum@OXO 2021, Group Exhibition, Gallery@OXO, OXO Towers, London
June 2021
Framed, a window event, Installation, Sarah Louise Dix Upholstery, Surrey Artist Open Studios 2021, Godalming
Feb-Mar 2020
Shifthink, Art-textiles in the Provincial, The Victoria Institute, Arundel
Dec 2018
Pop-up Exhibition, East Street, Farnham
Sept 2018
Continuum 2, Group Exhibition, London Design Festival, London
Sept 2017
Eleven, Group Exhibition, The Strand Gallery, London
Aug 2017
Postgraduate Exhibition, UCA, Farnham
Sept 2016
Makers at Menier, Group Exhibition, London Design Festival, London
Jun-Dec 2016
Contemporary Narratives, Crafts Study Centre (CSC) and UCA, Farnham
Residencies
May 2017
Artist Demonstration Day, Watts Gallery, Compton
Feb, Apr 2017
Ethel Mairet Response, Ditchling Museum, Ditchling
Publications
Sep 2019
Craven, M. (2019) Reflecting a Diaspora: In-between Whitework and Indigo.
In: Textile, Cloth and Culture.
Volume 17, 2019 – Issue 4: Textile and Place.
London, Taylor & Francis.
Available here (hidden link to pdf which I am working on)
May 2016
Craven, M. (2016) Skirt Cloth.
In: Contemporary Narratives, School of Crafts and Design project 2015-2016 [Catalogue].
Farnham: Crafts Study Centre and University for the Creative Arts.
Conference Papers
Aug 2022
The Culturally Dislocated Cloth – Elusive, Resistant or Interruptive.
Fashion, Photography Storytelling and Textiles, A Global Inclusive Interdisciplinary Conference.
Progressive Connexions, Athens, Greece.
Oct 2021
The culturally dislocated cloth – interruptive, elusive and resistant?
Textile and Place Conference, Colonial and postcolonial narratives strand.(Online)
Manchester School of Art, (MMU) and the 2021 British Textile Biennale. Manchester.
Jan 2021
An encounter with culturally dislocated cloth.
Postcolonialism, Postcommunism and Postmodernism, 3rd International
Interdisciplinary Conference (Online).
Gdansk, Poland
Jun 2019
In-between Whitework and Indigo Resist Cloth.
Fashioning Inclusivity 2019 Symposium: Textiles and Materials strand,
University of the Arts, London
Apr 2019
Reflecting Cultural Dislocation: In-between Whitework and Indigo Resist.
Postcolonialism, Postcommunism and Postmodernism,
2nd International Interdisciplinary Conference.
Gdansk, Poland
July 2018
The artist printed-form: a craft in-between letterforms, exhibition, July 2018 audience and meaning.
Craft and Text conference: Crafts Study Centre and International Textile
Research Centre, UCA, Farnham
Apr 2018
Reflecting a Diaspora: In-Between Whitework and Indigo Resist.
Textile and Place Conference: Politics of Migration, Displacement strand.
Manchester School of Art and the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester
Accepted Abstracts
Jul/Aug 2019
The Absent Presences – In-Between Whitework and Indigo Resist
Nordic Summer University: Summer Symposium Absences and Silences
Circle 7 Artistic Research | Performing Heterotopia. Roosta, Estonia
May 2018
In-Between Whitework and Indigo Resist.
IAFOR, International Conference on Global Studies (GLOBAL2018),
Fearful Futures strand. Barcelona, Spain