Through paintings on paper, rendered in gouache, Ellen Lesperance utilizes universal knitting vernacular to recreate historic garments worn by women activists, warriors, and cultural figures. For the past decade, she archived protest knitwear worn by the feminists of the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, a women's encampment that demonstrated against U.S. nuclear weapons storage in Berkshire, England (1981 to 2000). Lesperance is inspired by the protestors' creative direct action tactics, including the use of sweaters with knit-in language and protest symbols. Her practice involves a close study of archival photographs, film, and video footage of these women-led protests. She then maps out and replicates their sweaters into two-dimensional abstracted patterns, which is an impulse to represent women in ways that evade the patriarchal legacy of figurative painting. In 2020, Lesperance published a book of this archive titled Velvet Fist. These abstracted forms and paintings become an homage and proxy for the brave activists.