Reframing the British Quilt: Living Labour and Art Historical Memory

Working across disciplines and reflecting on the incorporation of practice-based methods, art historian Jess Bailey and historian Deb McGuire will situate histories and historiographies of the quilt within the British Isles. Focusing on case studies from communities in the North Pennines and the hills of Mid Wales between 1850–1920 and drawing from extant textiles held at the Bowes Museum, Tullie House and the Quilt Collection, York as well as living history museums such as Beamish and Museum Wales, St Fagans, the lecture will explore the ways in which material culture and practice-based methodologies can reanimate marginalised histories of creativity, bringing into focus the ways that we can frame textile art practices far from elite centres.

Recent attention to the quilt as an object of art historical significance in North America has engaged with abstraction and pattern among other issues to raise important questions regarding religion, gender and race. Quilting traditions stretching back into the Middle Ages in the British Isles reveal a similarly rich yet much more neglected art history, subtly distinct from themes of the North American tradition. Across Britain, quilters’ histories have been shaped by class, domesticity, regionalism, gender and geography, and their work raises its own provocations for how art historical research reflects, challenges and informs an endangered living tradition still practiced in Britain today.

Bailey and McGuire’s practice-informed approach will foreground the crucial but often overlooked distinctions between the techniques of patchwork and quilting which reveal very different regional narratives in Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland, England and Scotland. They will address the ways in which a quilt exists in layers, where pieced fabric, colour and geometry are often overlayed with intricately designed, drafted and then executed quilting stitches. These quilting stitches act to both practically secure a quilt and create secondary low relief sculptural effects which challenge us to reach beyond the visual to consider a sensorial and textural history. This collaborative lecture will connect material and visual art histories to the social histories of gender and labour unique to nineteenth- and twentieth-century quilts from the British Isles.

Bailey and McGuire will also share their work co-directing Within The Frame, an academic research project and heritage preservation effort using histories of art as a tool to build networks of revival across the ecosystem of carpentry, wool production and needlework, a localised network which once supported quilting in a frame as a thriving form of artistic expression and economic agency in the British Isles. Their research seminar will include a short demonstration of the skilled practice of quilting in a traditional frame and the opportunity to both view and touch extant nineteenth-century British quilts.

Image credit: Jennifer, Eleanor and Mrs C Alderson making a quilt at Black Howe, Upper Swaledale. 1965. Digital image courtesy of the Marie Hartley Estate. Leeds University Library, Special Collections.

Event format and access

The event will start with a presentation by Jess Bailey and Deb McGuire, lasting around 40 minutes. The presentation will be followed by Q&A and a free drinks reception.

The event is hosted in our Lecture Room, which is up two flights of stairs (there is no lift). The talk will also be streamed online, and the recording will be published on our website.