Gill Crawshaw

I’m a disabled person, based in Leeds in the north of England. In recent years I’ve been curating art exhibitions and organising other events and projects. Mainly I work with disabled artists on projects about disability rights and disabled people’s lives.

This is a change of role for me, having worked in a different field for most of my career. Although I’ve always been interested and engaged with the arts. One area that keeps drawing me back is textiles, perhaps because I did a degree in textile design in Leeds many years ago. So I’ve become interested in the intersections of textiles and disabled people’s lives, whether that’s contemporary disabled artists who use textiles in their work, or the history and heritage of the textile industry, which was the defining industry of Yorkshire and the north of England.

I got involved in disability activism in the 1980s, at first through disability arts and culture, which led me on to the wider disabled people’s movement. I was one of the founder members of the Disabled People’s Direct Action Network, known as DAN, a national network committed to non-violent civil disobedience, set up in 1993.

I’m now trying to bring my past experience of activism into my curatorial practice, although perhaps in a more subtle way.

I’m really proud of Any Work That wanted Doing, an exhibition that was part of Leeds 2023 Year of Culture.

It was developed from research I’d been doing into disabled people who worked in textile mills. I wanted to challenge the dominant narrative of disabled people being dependent and needy, and show that they were and are part of society, contributing and having a valuable role.

It was exciting to be able to commission some disabled artists to create work that responds fed to the research, and that linked disabled people’s lives today with disabled people in the past. The artists made fabulous work in a range of media. It was shown for several months amongst the collection of historic textile machinery at Leeds Industrial Museum, which was once the largest woollen mill in the world, which was amazing. Thanks to the museum for being such a supportive partner in the project, as well as to the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Leeds 2023.

You can see the artwork, the artists’ statements, an overview of the research and more on the exhibition’s website:

https://anywork.org.uk/

It was a natural progression, part of my focus on connections between textiles and disabled people. This focus began a few years ago when I organised an exhibition called Shoddy, which showed textile art by disabled artists: https://shoddyexhibition.wordpress.com/

I began researching all sorts of topics that brought disabled people and textiles together. Since then, I’ve developed some of my thoughts and blog posts further, including a post about disability rights banners. I was familiar with many of the banners I wrote about, having seen them in demos and, in the case of the DAN banners, protested alongside them.

I think your readers will particularly enjoy an illustrated essay I wrote for Disability Arts Online about the connections between contemporary disabled women textile artists and disabled needleworkers of the past:

https://disabilityarts.online/magazine/opinion/connected-by-threads/

In the About section of the Any work that wanted doing website, scroll down to find some links to writing about my research into disabled mill workers, including a zine:

https://anywork.org.uk/about

And there’s another zine focused on one 19th century mill worker, A Handsome Testimonial:

https://issuu.com/gillcrawshaw/docs/a_handsome_testimonial_lo_res_zine

If you want to contact me for more information, I’d love to hear from you. You can get in touch via the Any work that wanted doing website or message me on Instagram @gillcrawshaw