2026

Leila Ameer Credland

I am a multi-disciplinary designer, with work spanning editorial design, analogue printing, photography, book-binding, textile art, data visualisation, typography, illustration and activism. My work centres around analogue processes and the creation of material objects because I believe touch and physicality is vital to engaging people with information.

The Farm

This project is centred around my grandparent’s farm, my favourite place in the world to be. They have had the farm for 26 years but they are, unfortunately, moving and soon we will not be able to visit it again. In the form of a book and a map, I have aimed to preserve the collective memories of the farm for my family using an archive of the family’s photos and scans of various records and documents pertaining to the farm and the surrounding areas.

The map consists of various maps from the documents I scanned on my final visit, printed in letterpress and offset lithography. The book is printed using a combination of Risograph and digital print, consisting of the archive of images, the scanned documents, and analogue film photographs also taken on my final visit. The book is coptic bound by hand with 23 signatures, and both the book and the map are printed on paper made with recycled agricultural waste to keep in line with my grandparents ecological conservation efforts.

A Place to Tell Stories

I created this book in response to the removal of four public benches from the bottom of the road of my childhood home, where I have lived for most of my life. They were removed because a small group of people, new to the area, had determined that the people using the benches were exhibiting ’anti-social behaviour‘. Many of the people using these benches had been doing so for longer than the people who had them removed had even lived in the area.

Unfortunately, the removal of the benches and their speedy replacement with (so far unused) bike racks occurred too quickly for the surrounding community to even get a chance to respond. I decided to therefore create this book to show the importance of benches in people’s lives every day: as physical support, a resting space, a place to memorialise lost loved ones, a place to sit and chat, to listen to music, to admire a view, to tell stories...

I used images I took of the benches in the local common, and text from memorial messages on said benches to create this book. It was printed in riso, with the paper inside being made from agricultural waste to limit the impact on the environment.

Resistance is Woven

This textile protest banner is one outcome from my research project exploring the role of fibre arts in the (de)construction of ‘femininity’, and the use of textiles as powerful tools in grassroots, sociopolitical activist movements across the globe.

Fibre arts have traditionally been considered ‘women's work’ and are commonly associated with domestic spaces. Many activists, including in many feminist movements, have used these associations to subvert the medium, and the medium to subvert these expectations.

The materiality of this medium in protest art is its most significant characteristic because it is humanising, grounded in a common history, and encourages deeper engagement with the information through touch, as well as striking visuals. This has become even more significant as we have progressed into the current digital age, where information has become fleeting and impermanent.

The message of this particular banner aims to highlight the importance of community in order to resist existing structures of systematic oppression, and how fibre arts and physical media are in themselves a method of resistance.

Leila Ameer Credland

Email address

Instagram

Biography