PROFILE
A fine-art textile practitioner, educator and researcher.
Mona’s practice interrogates an Indian whitework embroidered christening gown and an indigo resist-print cloth. This work unravels cultural dislocation and the relational entanglements across space and time linked to the cloths. Both cloths are rooted in traditional textile techniques.
The ingrained legacy of European colonisation and the experience of living in a postcolonial nation influence the work.
Photographic, print and textile methods are applied in a cross disciplinary and experimental approach. Using light, cloth, stitch, drawing and digital processes, Mona creates installations and prints in “in-between” spaces. Printmaking mirrors the entangled complexity.
Exhibitions and Residencies
Exhibitions
July/Aug 2025
Soft Power, lives told through textile art
Curators Alice Kettle and Lesley Millar in collaboration with the RWA Bristol, RWA Bristol
July/Aug 2024, PH.D. VIVA Exhibtion
Unravelling a cultural dislocation: Inbetween two cloth stories,
James Hockey Gallery, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham
Oct/Nov 2022
ABOUT TIME, Group Exhibition
The Gallery at Grande Provence, Franschhoek, Western Cape, South Africa
Sept 2020 (postponed to Sept 2021)
Continuum, Group Exhibition,
OXO Gallery, London Design Festival,London
Feb/Mar 2020
Shifthink, Art-Textiles in the Provincial, Arundel, Sussex
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
2025
Artist-in-Residence
Ochre Print Studio, Guildford
Aug 2020
Making Space, Hampshire Online Open Studio, Associate maker, instagram takeover event,
Making Space, Havant
Aug 2019
Making Space, Hampshire Open Studios, Associate maker, Making Space, Havant
May 2017
Artist Demonstration Day, Watts Gallery, Compton
Feb, Apr 2017
Ethel Mairet Response, Ditchling Museum, Ditchling
Conference Papers
Nov 2024
InBetween Two Cloth Stories
The Artist as Public Intellectual …Rememory & Sankofa for an Imaginary of Ethics in Transnational Media Collaborations.
UKRI-HEIF funded event facilitated by Developing a Media Decolonisation Imaginary (DMDI)
July 2022
The culturally dislocated cloth – interruptive, elusive and resistant?
Progressive Connexions, Fashion, Photography, Storytelling and Textiles: An Interdisciplinary Conference. Athens, Greece.
Oct 2021
The culturally dislocated cloth – interruptive, elusive and resistant?
Textile and Place Conference, Colonial and postcolonial narratives strand. Manchester School of Art (MMU) and the 2021 British Textile Biennial.
Jan 2021
An encounter with culturally dislocated cloth.
Postcolonialism, Postcommunism and Postmodernism, 3rd International
Interdisciplinary Conference. Gdansk, Poland
Jun 2019 (postponed to Sept 2021)
In-between Whitework and Indigo Resist Cloth.
Fashioning Inclusivity Symposium: University of the Arts London (UAL)
Apr 2019
Reflecting Cultural Dislocation: In-between Whitework and Indigo Resist.
Postcolonialism, Postcommunism and Postmodernism, 2nd International
Interdisciplinary Conference. Gdansk, Poland (UAL)
July 2018
The artist printed-form: a craft in-between letterforms, exhibition, audience and meaning.
Craft and Text conference, Crafts Study Centre (CSC) 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
July 2022
Discomfort, and cloth narratives form threads across time and space.
Postcolonialism, Postcommunism and Postmodernism, 4th International
Interdisciplinary Conference. Gdansk, Poland
Jul/Aug 2019
The Absent Presences – In-Between Whitework and Indigo Resist.
Nordic Summer University Circle 7 Artistic Research | Performing Heterotopia
Summer Symposium Absences and Silences. Roosta, Estonia
May 2018
In-Between Whitework and Indigo Resist.
Fearful Futures, strand, IAFOR, International Conference on Global Studies (GLOBAL 2018)
Artist Statement
Thread and the resistant surface. How does the cloth tell the tale?
The space that I am drawn to work with belongs to a liminal in-between world, between the everyday of cloth that polishes, cleans, covers and toils and the world of memories inhabited by photography, pixels and printed paper. Here I create installations, photographs and prints working with cloth, light and shadow, pencil, paper and thread.
My work is inspired by a love of beauty in battered and worn cloth. The worn imperfection of the used and the hand-me-down white cloth and a bit of blue thread left to clutch onto tightly, become a reminder of home at the southern tip of Africa.
This work examines the worn cloth of the past and present that connects across decades to closely bound, knotted and gnarled migrated bundles, this has become a work of unravelling.
I currently unravel a bundle containing two cloths one white and one blue. Both share colonial and postcolonial histories alike but different. I unpick through a close looking, shifting focus through the process of drawing and stitching the tactile details.
Stitch by stitch through a familiar encounter with cloth, word and paper the possibilities unravel. I tug to pull thread slowly through the resistant, heavy and weighted surfaces. Tearing and puncturing, this resistance work uncovers the labour of different hands.
What thoughts, what lives, what worlds live in such fine stitches and marks that decorate the puckered and dyed surfaces?
How does the cloth tell the tale?
Spatially and materially aware, working at room scale, I transform and craft thread, paper and cloth into textile installations. The light sensitive and opaque qualities of particular materials are integral to the work as are the transitory qualities of cyanotype and indigo dye.
In this work, I translate the unpicked echo’s and shadows revealed through research.
The memories of sunlight washed white cloth mingle with prickly flora and the feel of soil so hot feet burn, this textually complexity I develop into prints.
My work is not about stitching perfection but designed to be evocative and arrest attention. Experimentally led, my stitch-making is a unique embroidery form that fits in-between the stitch that is aiming to be pretty and that which is raw. My stitch aims to be subtle and finely honed, resistant when required, moving off the surface dimensionally to pull the rough edges into focus.
Always striving to connect and cross boundaries between disciplines and dislocation, my decisions are made to evolve and express the stories carried in cloth.
Resume
Mona Craven is a fine artist, researcher and educator. Her praxis intersects a ‘south’ perspective and material culture research with creative research methods to think about the relationality between cloth things. Using space, light, paper and textile media, she reframes cloth histories into spatial encounters with cloth.
Mona offers a broad art and design skills-base, this draws on her career as a design-director and creative arts educator. Her practice includes facilitating research-led creative response in the arts, museums and education sector.
Education
2018 – 2025
Practice-based PH.D. Textile Culture (Completing)
University for the Creative Arts, United Kingdom
2015 – 2017
MA Textiles, Post-Graduate School of Crafts and Design (Distinction)
University for the Creative Arts, United Kingdom
Post Graduate Higher Education Diploma (PGCert), Rhodes University, South Africa
Bachelor of Fine Arts, Rhodes University, South Africa
Undergraduate Fine Art Studies, Port Elizabeth Technikon, South Africa