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.
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| 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.
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| 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…
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| Georgie Meadows, 'Untitled No. 63', 2007 |
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| 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.
