CJ Reay quilted so hard all summer that now he needs glasses. If you’ve so much as walked past a DIY space or left-leaning festival or event in the UK in recent years, you will have clocked Reay’s style. Centred around the old Friz Quadrata typeface made famous by Black Flag, his prints proclaim sentiments such as, “Queer utopias are not fantasies / Queer utopias are necessities!” or “No great men!
Only the great many!”, in two-tone riso print juxtaposed against vintage imagery. Reay cites punk band Crass’s artist Gee Vaucher as one influence, Barbara Kruger as another. So I try to do that, and I never try to do anything overtly negative.
It’s about trying to celebrate rather than denigrate.” The quilts follow on from two recent textile-based commissions. Last year, Reay worked with Bradford’s longstanding 1 in 12 anarchist social club to make banners celebrating its ethos, and with Barnsley Civic on a project inspired by banners made by striking miners’ wives. It got Reay learning rabidly about Welsh quilts, Amish quilts and the radical sewing histories detailed in Jess Bailey’s Many Hands Make a Quilt; the way that certain quilting blocks recur between disparate communities, marked by specific local quirks.
Beauty is important to him, he says. I wanted something that was representative of that, but also of something strictly human. It sounds so weird but the need to defend human culture has become really important to me, with everything being incorporated into digital machinery, or AI slop.
It feels like everything is so fake now that to make art that’s real is almost slightly revolutionary.” One long quilt declares: “May every data centre crumble to dust / May the machines of death turn to ruin & rust / May the flowers bloom & concrete split / May the last tech lord choke on his own bullshit.” The medium makes it: the juxtaposition of soft and human versus hard, robotic and accelerationist. While Reay isn’t religious, he calls them the prayer quilts “because art is a representation of a person’s soul in some ways. When I see AI art it feels like a total contradiction of what it is to be human and to make art.
This is literally me with sore fingers, sewing in my garage.” Reay, 38, is very genial company. Now based in East Yorkshire, he grew up near Carlisle in the town where the BNP had its HQ and printed its newspaper. Punk had already introduced him to antifascism, and he became part of a community that organised fundraising gigs and flyered outside the party’s meetings.
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