Maria Crean

I am a 21 year old textile artist working in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Currently I am creating subverted cross stitch samplers concerning fetishes and phobias. These pieces examine the human condition in the 21st centruy & address modernity's obsession with over classification and diagnosis.I create my pieces using a interactive grid I designed on photoshop. My work is heavily influenced by both sociology and psychology. Within psychology I am particularly interested in crime and deviancy. I wish to understand who or what determines the “appropriate” way to think about things & what makes someone “odd” or “normal”. I am attracted to the humour created by subverting samplers which are traditionally quaint and innocent. I feel my work is also making a covert statement about my situation and society. Samplers were originally used by women as a sort of “CV” of sewing skills which they could take with them to houses where they were applying for work. In this day and age these skills are no longer required so samplers are usually created for recreation. I believe traditional cross stitch samplers to be representative of domesticity and women’s work and also hold an ironic quality that I feel is important to my message. . My investigations into sexual fetishes drew together all the main elements I wanted to include in my work – sociology, psychology, deviancy and traditional textiles. My fetish pieces were investigating the sliding scale of acceptability. More and more things are becoming acceptable with each decade that passes and this leads me to question “where will this end?” Will there eventually be no deviancy. ? On the flipside of my fetish project I have now moved on to investigating phobias. At what point does a dislike of something irrational move from being ridiculous to being a recognised phobia? In the same manner as fetishes I wish to understand how things such as phobias are classified and defined. Does it take a certain number of people having an aversion to something to make it a phobia? Is it all quantitative? I hope that with my work people will be attracted by the quaintness and innocence of the designs but that their message will provoke a feeling of uneasiness.