ALICE GABB
Tell us the story of the first banner you ever made.
The first banner I ever made was in 2017 and it said ‘Kindness and Virtue’. It was huge, and on pink second-hand velvet. I’d been in America and seen a very old banner hung in a bar that said ‘Universal Toleration’ and I went away and researched that – it was a phrase from an English mutual aid society in the 1700s called the Odd Fellows. I’ve been making them ever since!
You teach lectures on the radical history of protest banners (among many other fascinating topics!). Did your interest in the history of the craft come before or after you began making them?
It was their radical history that made me interested in making my own. It felt like the right format to express what I wanted to say at
