About
The Art of Fiction
The creation of this patchwork object formed part of a wider project on the history of art making. This project, titled The Art of Fiction: Women's Writing and the Decorative Arts (October 2023 - March 2025), was based at the University of Exeter and led by Dr Patricia Zakreski. The research questions at the heart of this project considered how judgements of literary, aesthetic, and professional value affect women working in creative industries and how these women interact with these values in order to establish professional identities.
The Patchwork Object Project
Drawing upon the recent surge in collective craft as a way of connecting communities, particularly arising out of the pandemic lockdown conditions, the Patchwork Object Project used crafting events and the catalyzing power of social media to bring people together to generate a collaboratively sourced artwork. This project, which was open to public contributions from November 2023 to September 2024, has culminated in an interactive digital archive and a new work of art, Women's Work (2024), designed and crafted by the artist Ruth Broadway. Through this project, we wished to work with a global community of experienced craft practitioners and amateur storytellers to explore their practices, their conceptions of themselves as craftspeople and artists, and the impacts of collaborative making.
At the project's second scholarly workshop, on "Patchwork and Creativity", discussions around the aesthetics of crafting this object were especially dedicated to the continuing project to challenge and reorient contemporary attitudes to the creative labour generally associated with the feminine and the everyday. The workshop also sought to impact the way in which museum professionals consider the display of collaborative work and the everyday objects in their collections that are often left in stores, considered too ordinary to warrant attention, and how we record the labour of artists whose individual histories have not been preserved.
Through our public appeal for contributions to the patchwork object, we collected over 100 patches along with stories that detailed the history and/or significance of the fabric. These stories are now amassed and made publicly available here, in our Patchwork Object database. The physical patchwork, Women's Work, will be displayed at MAKE Southwest from 11 January to 22 February 2025.