Denmark textile artist Verity Byth sews together family legacy, feminism and finance into subversive stitching

Verity Byth is a woman on a mission. The Denmark-based artist incorporates feminist advocacy into her intricate textile artworks as part of her aim to get more women to take agency over their finances. Byth’s passion for women’s financial education has several origins, including her day job as a business strategist. She has led a high-flying career, from working across the Asia Pacific region for the technology corporation IBM to a global innovation lab in London. In 2017 she moved from her home in Melbourne to Denmark after falling in love with the natural environment and the local creative community on a visit to the region. It was around that time that she also began turning stitching, embroidery and crotchet from a lifelong crafting hobby that kept her hands busy while watching TV into an artistic practice. Byth employs what is known as subversive stitching to create textile artworks that explore issues affecting women, requiring hours of intricate work. “(Sewing) is seen as a very feminine, delicate domestic thing,” Byth said. “And then if you use it for protest or social change, it’s called subversive stitching because you’re actually flipping the meaning of it so that it becomes something more powerful.” In 2021 for her exhibition Coats of Courage at the Denmark Community Resource Centre, she exhibited a series of coats, each one created to tell a woman’s individual story of financial empowerment she had collected over interviews. Byth’s mission of communicating such big topics through her artwork is a personal one, as she is descended from working seamstresses who butted up against the patriarchy, starting with her grandmother who worked during the Great Depression. “My grandma sewed but she was terrified that she would make a mistake because she didn’t get paid enough from making a dress to pay for the material if she made a mistake,” Byth said. “And so my mother remembered even though she was an expert seamstress and she cut dresses without a pattern, she was terrified. “My aunt left school at 14 because the family needed her wages, so she went to work in a shirt factory. “Even though she was also an expert sewer and she sewed all her life, she missed out on an education because they couldn’t afford it, so she also was a subsistence sewer.” Her younger sister, Byth’s mother, wasn’t a seamstress but had an impactful experience with sewing that set her on a feminist path. “She was left-handed and everyone had to sew (at school), and she was beaten for sewing with her left hand,” she said. “And then when she sewed with her right hand, she was criticised because her work wasn’t good. “She grew up as a very strong feminist with a strong sense of social justice, and she was the convener of Women’s Electoral Lobby in Victoria and was given an Order of Australia Medal for her services to feminism.” Byth’s aunty and cousin taught her to sew, and she said she feels she channels her family legacy through her work. “I’m stitching for my grandma because she would be amazed to see the fact that I built a studio just to sew in, and I don’t really sell anything — that would be amazing for her,” she said. “And for my mother, the fact that I’m stitching things, you know that expression ‘we rise by lifting others’, that’s what I feel the stitching is doing.” This month, Byth is hosting a series of workshops in Denmark and Albany called My Money Matters which are aimed at women and inspired by an artwork she created for an exhibition at Vancouver Arts Centre last year. The piece, Abecedary for Women’s Financial Education, is created in the form of a child’s alphabet poster where each letter stands for a basic financial concept. The artwork was intended explore the idea of what it would mean to have young girls learning A is for agency and B is for budget, and the workshops will see each participant take a letter and concept that they stitch on to while exploring the intersections of feminism, finance and fabric. It is all part of Byth’s drive to share the financial knowledge she has with other women, and in a country where the fastest growing group of people experiencing homelessness are women over the age of 45, she believes it is now more important than ever. “I have to be passionate about it because there’s a real cost for not being financially literate and financially independent,” Byth said.