Patchwork Object

Items

• Patch by Róisín
  I was taught to sew before I could read or write. I remember being given a simple tapestry project to complete – a flower perhaps? – with colourful strands of acrylic wool and a plastic needle. The women around me were always engaged with some type of needlework. Both my grandmothers knitted; my mother sewed most of my clothes and had her eyes constantly bent on whatever counted cross-stitch project she was into at the time. Growing up in the 1980s and 90s, needlework had a definitely uncool vibe to it. This was very vexing as a teenager, as I thoroughly enjoyed it. Unlike writing in ink, sewing had an unmatched material, sensorial, embodied quality to it; also, I enjoyed learning new stitches and their names, as if the whole thing were a secret code only women could share. Perhaps this is why I persevered, in spite of teasing by (usually) male students. When writing my PhD thesis (on Victorian women and needlework), I was haunted by Elizabeth Parker’s now well-known sampler/diary. A young servant in the 1830s, she cross-stitched her life story in an astonishingly raw and honest way, yet her opening statement, “As I cannot write,” reminds us of how women’s voices, and their expression in fabric and thread rather than print, have been disqualified throughout history. Needlework, and textile work in the broader sense are ambiguous because they have been tools of restriction and oppression for women as well as self-expression. My Irish grandmother’s dreams of becoming a doctor were crushed as she, one of many children in a working-class family, was taken out of school as a teenager to work in a dressmaking factory. I often thought of her as I was finishing my thesis.