Since the start of 2025 I, along with a number of others, have been constantly campaigning to keep Walsall Leather Museum in its Grade II Listed home: A former leatherworks which is very much the first part of the collection you encounter.
I’ve made a lot of work over the past fifteen months relating to this, so I’m finally collating all the work I’ve made so far – a practical record of my attempts at Art As Activism/Craftivism.
First up – Placards!
You can’t study art in Walsall when Bob & Roberta Smith is on a residency without getting seriously excited about signwriting.
The first step in Walsall Council’s attempt to close the Leather Museum was that it needed to close due to costs – this was for the 25/26 budget year, and so on 8th February we protested:
And the result was… a success! Following the public reaction to the consultation and our efforts then council leader Gary Perry gave the museum a stay of execution, but advised that it would likely be reviewed for the next financial year. Lauren and Michelle were asked to put forward ideas to keep it afloat, and all seemed… good. However….
Lauren and Michelle were sidelined, and all their plans, hard work and industry contacts BEGGING to discharge some of their Corporate Social Responsibility in the museums direction were ignored. All conversations about the future of the museum were entirely based around “what a future museum could look like”, not how to keep the Leather Museum in its current home. Then Perry left the council, and the bad penny of Walsall politics returned… but there was no word as to the Leather Museum’s future. However, knowing that August/September was the time such decisions would likely be up for consideration, I wanted to keep the issue current – firstly by doing a local TV interview:
And secondly by resurrecting an old performance – The Cantess – to deliver an impassioned speech about the museum:
Then, the news we’d been dreading. Walsall Council were ‘relocating’ the Leather Museum, with no actual plans, with no public consultation, and some extreme linguistic gymnastics to justify why they were entitled to steamroll through the plans without even a full council debate on the matter. The building was to be sold to Walsall College on a peppercorn rent for 125 years. Mike Bird refused any debate, refused any alternatives, refused to give any clear reasoning behind his decision making.
So first up, I figured I’d try to gazump the college. I paid the full rent to both Walsall Council Payments Team and Mike Bird himself. In fact, I figured (given Mr Bird’s alleged passion for brown envelopes) I’d pay him double, to sweeten the pot:
And sometimes you just need to repetitively stab something a few thousand times to get the stress out. So I began stitching – remembering Athena, remembering her status as the patron of war and the patron of needlework, and feeling like I could use a little of her assistance right now.
Then I decided to make it more specifically about the Leather Museum – inspired by the Tricoteuse who brought their knitting to the guillotine.
And finally! a new series of peppercorns-as-currency called “The Spoils of Walsall MBC”
Vicky Roden 