Fancy Work: Reading into the Silences and Learning That Not All Archives Are Forever
My Nana was a habidasher, my mother was a habidasher’s assistant, and my great aunt was the head seamstress on a shop floor. This is a phrase I have written into my work many times, thinking about how there is a lineage of skill, of thread and knowledge between my maternal family. I will admit now that until I read Alice Hattrick’s Fancy WorkI have been ignorant on how much thread and sewing skills hold a rich history: an archive like no other.
Focusing on May Morris, mostly known in history as Willaim Morris’s daughter, the book flows through Hattrick’s research, life, and reflections on the way threads, particularly embroidery, has brought together a portal into understanding how a queer archive might exist. The figure of May Morris is presented by Hattrick as a woman who, once her father died, lived her own life regimentate around archiving her father’s work, developing her needlework craft, and maintaining the estate with her partner MF.
MF, who is often left out of the Morris history, is known as a tenant, man-ish woman, gardener, and many things except the explicit truth of being May’s partner. As Hattrick states: ‘The record of their togetherness is sparse but occasionally vivid’. What Hattrick develops within the book is not just an entwined history of two people who didn’t gender conform, who used sewing and gardening as resistance in their own way, but also how an archivist, in this case Hattrick, must learn to read what isn’t there.
Queer history, for many, is a modern invention, an oxymoron of sorts as something made in the now cannot be historical, yet the most compelling feature of this book is how Hattrick invites us to use the same techniques of survival and erasure forced onto queer people in the past to develop a way investigating and developing an archive that was actively refused or destroyed. Their choice to make a joint letter signature – ‘love from us both’ – to be evidence, a reminder, that the way history is recorded often creates a narrative that de-legitamises those who are never going to be remembered that way. ‘Love from us both’ is how, in a time where May and MF’s relationship was not accepted, they presented themselves. Together. Oral accounts and letters of the two of them traveling, existing, living in a house without designated separate bedrooms - these are the facts we are invited to really listen to, and to let ourselves read what isn’t being said. The silences are the facts.
This makes perfect sense for a community that would have had their records actively omitted or destroyed to fit a social-hetero narrative; our history as a community is curated to that which is allowed to survive. But in books like Fancy Work, the calm looking into the silences shows how to form a new history and reclaim facts as things that are unsaid, not just a museum's normal figurative data, wall texts, and catalogue essays.
Their choice to focus on May fits not just because she lived an interesting life and comes close to a famous queer figure in history, but also the nature of her work being sewing provides a great reflective practice to see how archives and history fade. Often May herself would be working with materials that would not last, trying to preserve the stitching on needlework that was deteriorating. Here Hattrick reminds us that not everything can be preserved forever, and this doesn't mean it never existed, that it didn’t hold value, or that it lacked importance because it wasn’t preserved to a museum standard. As Hattrick puts it ‘Like queer history, the language of textiles is also one of destruction and repair’. That: Embroidering the truth is not the same as ignoring the facts. It is attending to the ephemeral gestures that survive across time to imagine a future of queer possibilities. These are the remains, the things that are left, the rumours left hanging in the air.
For years I have been searching and researching around a wide spanning project I have called ‘alternative archives’. Having worked in libraries and archives myself, having been raised working class and going to historical sites where nothing close to our family was represented, I became acutely aware of what counted as history and what was allowed to wither away. I’ve been trying to see how my family exists, mostly in stories, but equally in material that isn’t labelled and won’t be there forever. The dry stone walls and quarries of Derbyshire, near the Peak District, are the hands of my dad’s side, whilst my mum’s are shiphands or engineers and the women who work with thread.
Textile fragments – rather than whole cloths, or indeed whole sculptures, or whole pots – encourage a different way of looking. Confronted with the fragments of embroidered textile, the immediate question that comes to mind is: What has been lost? Where is the rest of it? What happened to the people who made them, used them and traded them? The loss of the whole is indexed by the fragment: loss is always present in the piece that survives.
In many of the examples Hattrick raises in the book, including May herself, there is a spotlight on how history is given through craft. By teaching a daughter to sew a mother is passing on both her culture and providing a practical skill. Seen prominently with the Gees Bend Quilters - their quilts have been displayed in white walled galleries, but were still a means to survive in poor conditions, making from scrap material and keeping hands busy. Some of these quilts, as Hattrick points out, have stains on them from bodies that actually used them: The creative voice of a quiltmaker can be heard after death, even by non-family members. It makes me think about how my mum’s creations of curtains, pillow covers, jumpers, blankets, would look on display. It feels out of place when I think of all the rooms dedicated to a rich woman's vanity table and that history was for a tiny percentage, not a representative of life.
What I found most endearing about Hattrick’s book was the reflection on time, a commodity for many. By sharing how they spent their time learning to dye fabric, embroider it, mend it, these passages become a reminder that taking time for yourself, and using it as you want, is liberating and, in some ways, a protest. Sewing as a craft needs time and cannot be rushed, many of the products of sewing are made to be used and hold time in their forms. Skills are passed from person to person meaning there is time needed to learn and master. For May and MF to create their own timetable was something that sounded radical to me, as most of us live in the fragments of time between work. Hattrick even shares throughout their own relationship with time having lived alone, then with their partner, and how to navigate this shared space and time.
‘Parallel play is doing different things in proximity to one another, without needing to be doing the same thing, because having to enjoy doing the same things all the time is stressful. It offers both company and escape into your own pastimes.’ When reading these lines I was lying in bed next to my partner. He was doing his own thing and I was doing mine. It made me realise not only is this ability to share space but use time differently a key feature of a partnership and joyful thing, but also foreshadowed a key theme in Hattrick’s work which they state early on: ‘our interpretation of history is not for the benefit of the dead but the living, which includes queer people’.
How we use time, how we interpret how time is used, and how much of queer history, and thus time, has been taken away are the facts. The book makes me think of Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter and Prospect Cottage founded by Derek Jarman. It serves as a reminder of how queer time is lost in history, but in practice is a thoughtful occupation.
Within Fancy Work we are given a monograph on May Morris, an interesting and insightful history of sewing and textiles within an art historical lens, and of how an archive is not a set thing, especially for queer bodies and work. I tried to take my time with the book, pace the reading and remember I was there to engage not just consume, the result being a book that is tattered and marked by various bags, pens and papers around my life, letting it become an archival piece within itself.
Hattrick approaches a lot of topics in Fancy Work, but they intertwine naturally, thread by thread, showing how history and the archive is a venn diagram not just a closed glass case. As someone who was raised with maternal lineage being through thread, and coming from a community often only represented by the on lookers - in my case working class, in Hattrick's queer communities - this book felt like a safe space to allow lived realities to be intellectualised not just as gossip or some story, and reinforced how archival techniques need a refresh before interesting lives such as May Morris’ are lost to an upper class heteronormative history. Hattrick has provided the needle to pierce the institution and to follow this thread.
Fancy Work: Unpicking Past Lives by Alice Hattrick is out now via Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Cover Image: Fancy Work. Image taken by (Parentheses) Review.