My Money Matters - Tote Project

Southern Edge Arts commissioned me as the lead artist for this community project for women and girls in the Great Southern Region of Western Australia. Our aim was to use the age-old women’s way of stitching together around a table to encourage conversation about financial agency and literacy, to connect to a supportive circle of women mentors and to build peer support for greater financial confidence and problem-solving. Based on the textile piece I presented in the RISE! show at Vancouver Arts Centre in 2022, I developed a design for a tote bag to carry each of the letters in the textile “poster” called An Abecedary for Womens Financial Empowerment.

In May and June 2023, SEA’s Creative Director Anne Sorenson and I met women and girls in arts spaces in Albany and Denmark, a youth drop-in centre and a neighbourhood centre, where each of us selected and embellished a tote bag that spoke to our sense of financial empowerment at the time.

Plans for later phases of the project are to exhibit the finished tote bags, meet again to catch up and share our money stories together, and watch a film of excerpts from the project workshops.