Patchwork Object

Items

• Patch by Alexandra
  My mother painted the headboard of my childhood bed and stationed it at the very top of a rundown house in Bradford-on-Avon, the creaky stairs littered with roly polies. On the days that I didn’t cry and ask to be carried up, I would race to bed and couch myself under Edward Lear’s lines: Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live; Their heads are green, and their hands are blue, And they went to sea in a Sieve. The lines were built into the painting of a green-faced woman, eyes bright in the sea spray, sitting atop a sieve, and in those moments, that bed became my sieve-y sanctuary. There are two tapestries in my parents' library that are scenes of the The Lady and the Unicorn. My grandmother made cross-stitches that I profess to be my first introduction to the Pre-Raphaelites, though I don’t know where these are now or if they were a product of my imagination. But the perfectly crafted diptych of a woman, standing tall, in a magical grove, remains. Sometimes I wonder if my siblings and I are the Rossetti children reincarnated and every time I reread Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” it takes on new meaning. I like Victorian art a lot, but now I like the work of Howardena Pindell and Rosie Wylie even more. As an adult, I sense the profound affect that the design and craft of women has had on my aesthetic imagination, and that I still reach toward it in my professional and personal life. So, the lines “far and few” mean to me the preciousness inherent in the simplest acts of making; that rare kind of aesthetic love that permeates your imagination and stays with you all your life long. That, to me, is an especial quality preserved by the creative ephemera cultured by the women in my family – that which is precious.
• Patch by Bruna
  I'm an Anglo-American-Canadian and have always been acutely aware of the ever varying in ever subtle ways that social 'niceties' (are they nice?) are imposed on women and the female voice. My creativity, such as it is, is drawn from a sideways on, broad/broad's, gal's, dame's perspective.
• Patch by Lauren
  Crafty Lady – this was how we knew Grandma and our family joke. I have fond memories of making peg dolls, cross-stich and paper quilling with Grandma and my sister. It was normal for me to be surrounded by so much family creativity growing up. It wasn’t until much later, after her passing and I had graduated university, I learned Grandma had also attended art school then in the second world war was a draughtswoman creating technical drawings. We had found drawings from Grandma’s time at art school tucked safely away in the loft… they look as if I drew them. The same approach to line, the same application of colour and the same choice to leave areas seemingly incomplete. How is it that something I had never seen could hold so much influence on the artist I had become? For my patch I chose to use a flower design (two studies – one complete and one unfinished) that she had painted while studying. Subtly transferring the image to the fabric, then embroidering areas as well as extending the design by repeating other flowers from the design to scale. Throughout the process I used materials that were Grandma’s. Including a hoop, thread and appliqué from material that was hers. All this while also leaving an area of image transfer untouched with the echo of the original design. My own collaboration with the past. Grandma’s influence is strong in our family. I can’t help but wonder, if she had pursued a career following the war what would she have done? My Grandma is my inspiration and motivation. I am proud to be so much like her. She was so much more than a ‘crafty lady’.
• Patch by Sara
  A few years ago I volunteered at Monk's House, Virginia Woolf's home in Sussex from 1919 until her death in 1941. My favourite item was a set of Shakespeare's works which Woolf re-bound in 1936 in colourful marbled paper. As I practice bookbinding, I was intrigued to learn more about Woolf's binding hobby. I discovered that Woolf began lessons in bookbinding in 1901 aged 19 and went on to bind books throughout her adult life, for herself and for friends and family. Woolf's approach to bookbinding included pasting colourful papers over dull leather bindings, using patterned, abstract or marbled papers to re-cover books, cutting leather and paper roughy leaving jagged edges, and using discarded headed notepaper and endpapers, re-using paper and leather labels or hand-writing labels for re-bound spines. Woolf's bindings have been called 'slapdash' and 'rotten' as they appear technically poor; Woolf herself described her bookbinding as 'amateurish.' However, I find a playfulness and subversiveness to her binding - a deliberate rejection of a masculine tradition of skilled 'professional' bookbinding methods in favour of a feminising 'amateur' domestic patchwork aesthetic. This patch is inspired by Woolf's creative bookbinding. I cut the front board of a book of Tacitus in Latin with a private school book -plate on the reverse - to represent the masculine domination of knowledge, education and professions which Woolf criticised in A Room of One's Own. I then re-purposed the spine of the book with its title, pasting over Woolf's name and the word 'binder,' I cut up a bookmark handmade by Cate Olsen (owner of Much Ado Books where I work) that had a picture of Woolf laughing layered over colourful paper, and embroidered the word 'amateurish' and an antique shell button onto the cut up papers, finishing it with a roughly cut strip of leather. I hope Woolf would approve! Sara Clarke Beloved Bindery, Lewes.