Fancy Work

Unpicking Past Lives

Blending biography, memoir and art criticism, Fancy Work: Unpicking Past Lives – the latest work from the author of Ill Feelings – explores the ever-shifting tensions between family, labour and gender through the history of embroidery, or ‘fancy work’.

What can a scrap of embroidery tell us about how to live? How can the past help us imagine unconstrained lives when not all traces remain? To explore these questions, Alice Hattrick turns to the embroidery designer May Morris and her circle, including her father William Morris; her mother Jane, an artist’s model and embroiderer herself; and MF, May’s gender non-conforming partner of twenty years. Through this queer encounter with the Arts and Crafts movement, Hattrick shifts attention from dominant narratives of design towards intimacy, labour and domestic life. Looking to May – alongside others who have found in textiles a means of resistance – Hattrick traces connections between these histories and their own queer identity, family ties and precarious working conditions within an ableist society. Expansive in thought, form and time, Fancy Work stitches together archival fragments, domestic spaces and ongoing sites of struggle, insisting on the political force of often overlooked acts of defiance.

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