Visit to Frayed: Textiles on the Edge exhibition

As I mentioned in my last blog post, my Mum and I recently visited an exhibition at the Time and Tide Museum, Great Yarmouth entitled Frayed: Textiles on the Edge. The exhibition centred around the idea of needlework as therapy, exploring this theme in relation to grief and mourning, illness both mental and physical, and isolation and imprisonment. As such, it fit in with my own strong views and feelings concerning the therapeutics of stitch and its role in my current grief, which I wrote about back in August. Combine that with the fact that the exhibition also explored ideas around writing with the needle and producing textile text, including the ElizabethParker sampler I had written about for my dissertation and which means an incredible amount to me, I feel almost as if some freaky cosmic occurrence brought it all about… the exhibition just blended with all my feelings and interests so amazingly precisely, it was a true joy to visit, and ended up being a form of therapy in itself…

The first piece we viewed was ‘Love and Anger’, an embroidered handkerchief from Jacqui Parkinson’s ‘Good Grief’ series of works, that focuses on the artist’s anguish after the loss of her husband. The handkerchief features only angry red and black, with knotted red embroidery and words spiralling from a central wound that looks as localized yet penetrating as a gunshot to the heart. A capitalised border shouts ‘YOU GOD ANGER ME’, while embroidered words read, ‘how dare you leave without asking permission, leaving open this mess named ‘life’, exposing for all time the wound of a lost glance, a lost word, a lost touch.’ Even the way the handkerchief is framed, stretched taut with exposed lacings onto a steely square, added to its feelings of angered torture and pain. Within about a minute of viewing it, my Mum and I were both welling up uncontrollably. We discovered later in the exhibition, thanks to a bookshelf full of related reading material (a brilliant idea, I thought!), that Parkinson has also produced a book called ‘Good Grief?’ featuring more of her powerful art and words. 

Jacqui Parkinson, 'Love and Anger', 2007

The exhibition also featured a spectacular set of bed hangings made by a Norfolk woman named Anna Margaretta Brereton, after the death of her beloved eldest son in 1800. Encouraged by gifts of fabric from loved ones, this intricately detailed patchwork project provided a source of focus and creative therapy for Anna during the four years it took her to begin to recover from her loss. I thought the hangings were truly unique and unlike anything I had seen before in terms of their design and intricacy. This, coupled with the sheer size of the work produced and the amount of time and devotion it took to make the hangings, is a powerful and moving testament to the enormity of grief, particularly the loss of a child. I like the way that when the hangings are on the bed, (which was specially designed by a textile conservator in order to display them safely), they stand as a three dimensional monument rather than only a framed piece on a wall, displaying seemingly endless fabric pieced and patched together by Anna. The creation of dressings for a bed connects to the therapeutic nature of the stitchery, as a bed is indeed a place of quiet respite and comfort. At the same time, however, I find it more complex and troubling, as if sleeping in the bed with the hangings could instead be painfully shrouding yourself with grief and loss. Ultimately, I think both comforting respite and indulging your grief, letting it overwhelm you and just allowing yourself to feel your feelings, are equally important parts of trying to recover, and for me the bed represents both of these things.

Alongside the Elizabeth Parker sampler, which I have discussed in my previous post, were some more nineteenth-century needlework samplers by young women. Three small samplers by a girl called Louisa Buchholz, executed in absolutely miniscule black stitches, commemorate the loss of her mother, uncle and father, all within a heartbreaking seven year time frame. Particularly poignant for me was another sampler by two sisters. Begun by 10 year old Martha Grant in 1833, the sampler, it is assumed, was in fact completed by her sister Charlotte, after Martha died in October 1834. One of the things I liked most about all these pieces related to mourning was how the combination of works both contemporary and historical, big and small, conventional and unconventional, ultimately connected all their female makers together in a shared experience of grief. As bereaved viewers of their work, and makers ourselves, we too connected to and shared in that experience and gained some comfort in that.

Detail of Craske's lovely tones and textures

The remainder of the exhibition focused on further ways in which stitch can be therapeutic, exploring mental illness (also a subject particularly close to us), physical illness and imprisonment. An extraordinary piece of stitchery by John Craske entitled ‘The Evacuation of Dunkirk’ occupied an entire wall. Craske was a Norfolk man who, after developing an abscess on the brain and subsequently enduring long stays in hospital, found relief in what he called ‘painting in wools’. From the confines of his hospital bed he transformed the stories of wartime escapades he heard on the radio into stitched pictures. I particularly like the way Craske gives the skies, grasses and hills such wonderful texture and movement, and the sheer size of the Dunkirk piece is breathtaking. An unfinished section of bare calico is also poignant, as Craske’s death in 1943 sadly meant he never got to finish his work. 

Whilst I earlier mentioned a sense of a shared community of female mourners, the exhibition also highlighted the significant amount of males that also find relief through needlework. In addition to John Craske’s work, there was a fascinating 1945 embroidery kit entitled ‘Needlecraft for HM Forces’, along with a part-completed project. Such kits were manufactured and distributed to infirm soldiers after the Second World War. The exhibition also explored the use of stitching not only as mental therapy, but a means to securing a brighter future, through the legacy of prison reformer Elizabeth Fry and the charity Fine Cell Work. This charity trains prison inmates in sewing and embroidery, producing beautiful homewares for which the participants, 97% of whom are men, are paid. Not only does this allow the makers to save for future outside of prison, it also constitutes a valuable source of self-esteem, highly trained skill, and rehabilitation. The pieces produced by Fine Cell Work are of amazing quality, and I really like their modern and witty designs, for example the tattoo-style needlepoint cushions on their website, and the JohnnyCash cushion cover that was displayed in the exhibition. I also love the way the project breaks down a number of stereotypes and assumptions concerning both the gendering of needlework as ‘women’s work’, and the talents, interests and abilities of male prisoners.

The exhibition’s main draw, for me and I’m sure many others, was the display of two samplers by Lorina Bulwer, a Great Yarmouth woman and resident of the Great Yarmouth workhouse lunatic ward. The samplers had never been shown together before, meaning that their display was even more special. The exhibition more accurately described the pieces as ‘embroidered letters’ of extraordinary length, obsessively hand stitched by Bulwer during the early 1900’s. I had heard and read about the letters before whilst researching my undergraduate dissertation, as like Elizabeth Parker’s sampler they constitute another fascinating example of a lost female voice trying to reach out in unorthodox ways. Bulwer went to extraordinary lengths to provide for herself a medium of communication in the most abject of circumstances. Languishing in the lunatic ward yet nonetheless determined to be heard, she crafted a necessary physical format for her text by patchworking scraps of fabric together with a lining and backing, and even made sure she used varying colours of thread to embroider with, in order to make her words always stand out clearly against the background. The text is all capitalised, connoting a screaming desire for communication, whilst some particular words or phrases are also highlighted by use of bolder colour, particularly red, or are or underlined. It is the stitching of the letters themselves that holds together the layers of fabric, symbolising the profound intertwining of communication and textile crafting here: it is words that constitute the purpose, content and structure of the piece. Whilst much of the text reads as unorganised ramblings, I truly believe the letters to be of literary value and open to the same kind of consideration I gave the Elizabeth Parker sampler. After discovering full transcripts of the samplers on the blog dedicated to the Frayed exhibition, I hope to undertake such study over the coming months. 

I myself have rambled on for some considerable length now, so it may be time to wrap up… I just wanted to briefly mention my final two favourite pieces from the exhibition. Whilst I had heard about and seen (if only online/in books) examples of pretty much everything else that was in the exhibition, I was really excited to discover two new artists that I hadn’t heard of before. Georgie Meadows, a former Occupational Therapist, produces amazing ‘stitched drawings’ using machine embroidery. Her work focuses on portraiture of the elderly and people in mental healthcare, using the visual to communicate individuality and the importance of caring and careful looking. I also took note that she backs her fabric with wadding before machine stitching on it, which I think really enhances the work’s surface and is a technique I will certainly be trying out in the future. My second new discovery, and one I am unbelievably excited about, is the work of Sara Impey. Writing her own literary material, her work involves densely machine stitching her writings onto quilts. Such work is the type of thing I have often thought about exploring myself, and is a direct descendant of both Parker and Bulwer’s communicative acts of embroidery. The piece on display at the exhibition, entitled ‘Stitch Talk’, not only constitutes a stunning and unusual visual piece but a truly interesting read, contemplating the processes of writing and stitching, the visual and the verbal, and their interrelations. I am a little bit in love! I swiftly ordered Impey’s book 'Text in Textile Art' and will be writing about it in the near future…

Georgie Meadows, 'Untitled No. 63', 2007

Sara Impey, 'Stitch Talk', 2011

Phew, I could probably keep going for ages… All in all, it was a truly special and moving visit that, after a particularly difficult few months, has now given me the motivation for my recent spate of blog updates, and take up my hand embroidery again after a long phase of dressmaking instead. In a way, then, the exhibition was not only about the role of stitch as different forms of therapy, but was itself profoundly therapeutic for both me and my Mum.

An old friend revisited: Elizabeth Parker's circa 1830 sampler

Last week, at an exhibition entitled ‘Frayed: Textiles onthe Edge’ at the Time and Tide museum, Great Yarmouth (more on that in my next post!), I revisited a piece of textile that last year dominated my life and thoughts for months on end! The item is Elizabeth Parker’s autobiographical textile sampler, which was the subject of my undergraduate dissertation at the University of Manchester.  Belonging to the Victoria and Albert Museum (whose online collection entry on it can be found here), the sampler features a 1,643 word autobiographical outpouring by a seventeen year old, working class, nineteenth-century female, painstakingly crafted in tiny red cross stitches. Parker narrates her childhood, abuse in the workplace, suicidal temptations and mental struggles in a confessional and prayer-like manner. Devoid of the moral verses, ornamental borders and decorative stitching typical of samplers from the seventeenth century onwards, the piece stands out as highly unique and profoundly powerful. 

© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

My degree was in English Literature, and Parker’s sampler provided a perfect opportunity to bring my love of textile into my work. Whilst the sampler had previously only really been written about as a textile artefact, I saw its value as a literary text in itself that could be analysed and written about in just the same way as one would any other novel, poem, play or traditional autobiography, despite its unorthodox textile form. To put many months of study into painfully generalised terms: due to gendered moral and religious discourse concerning women’s roles, traditional autobiographical writing and publishing was simply not an opportunity afforded many historical females, and especially not suicidal, abused, seventeen year old maidservants. There is a large literature of critical work relating to the importance of reclaiming the voices of women throughout history who, due to their gender, social and economic status, were not able to have their voices heard in orthodox ways (if anyone wants to get in touch re: reading lists I’d be happy to help!) For me, Parker’s sampler constituted an amazing chance to recover one such lost voice and give it the serious literary consideration it deserves, as well as exploring the interplay between its form and content: essentially, what does the fact that it is a textile text mean, what effects does this have on it as a piece of literature. 

my precarious position of study!

At the time of writing my dissertation the sampler wasn’t on display anywhere. Instead, however, I was able to go and view it in storage at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Blythe House facility in Hammersmith, which was an amazing and special experience for me in itself! Unfortunately this did also mean that I was only able to view the sampler whilst precariously standing at the top of a tall stepladder, as it was hung very high up! As a result, my photos are all very close up! I’d also like to give special thanks to V&A curator Edwina Ehrman for meeting with me that day and also taking me up to the conservation studios, which was just fantastic. 

Now, the dissertation totals 31 pages and I can’t really go into it all without practically rewriting the whole thing on here!  So just briefly… the focus of my study was at its most broken down level, I suppose, the complex paradoxes that surrounded every aspect of the sampler. The text begins with the words ‘As I cannot write’, immediately conjuring up a whole load of questions given that Parker is indeed communicating in text (and thus ‘writing’), yet this text is not orthodox writing, but stitch. Nor is it, however, a conventional textile sampler. As my previous post on the evolution of samplers discusses, by the 19^th century textile samplers had become the ultimate method by which traditional Victorian femininity was inculcated: not a site for independent production of text and communication. Parker’s stitching therefore occupies a strange and subversive space, negotiating gender norms and traditions to perform a radical act of autobiographical communication at the same time as it claims not to be autobiographical ‘writing’, hiding in the safety of its textile form, and subsequent associations with feminine behaviour in sewing. 

This sense of paradox is furthered by close study of the text itself. I discovered profound anxiety concerning silence and speech, agency and passivity, and the problems of narrating both personal trauma and confession. Parker is nonetheless compelled to speak out, for the sake of her wellbeing and salvation, at the same time as she recognises this act, and even her own thoughts, as transgressive. Connecting Parker’s act of autobiographical stitching to both the theories of Hélène Cixous concerning the need for an exclusively female form of writing with the body, and the ancient story of Philomela, who after being raped and having her tongue cut out won justice by weaving a depiction of her story, I ultimately argued that the textile form of Parker’s writing is crucial in resolving the tensions and paradoxes discussed so far. The act of joining together fabric and thread in every stitch offers a valuable alternate discursive site where Parker is free to express herself, simultaneously healing and joining her fractured mental state. The fact that the sampler is a textile text is, I found, absolutely intrinsic to the meaning and power of Parker’s communicative act. 

I find the above painfully brief and badly explained compared to the months of research and writing that went into the original dissertation, but I hope it is enough to spark someone’s own thoughts and interest without being too garbled! A nice surprise was that the dissertation won the De Quincey essay prize - meaning that thankfully I can't have been the only one in UofM's English department who thought it was interesting (always a relief) - who knew being a textile nerd would come in so handy! Again, for anyone wanting reading tips on anything from material practices and gender/feminism, female life writing and autobiography, samplers, the role of form in literary texts, etc, just get in touch!