Life as an embroidery or stitched cloth
“Needlework can take us far away from where we are in our imagination, but it can also lead us back to where we belong.” Clare Hunter
“Sewing not only traps memory; it can also help to rekindle it.” Clare Hunter
In her book, Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, Clare Hunter, a community-minded textile artist, banner maker, and exhibition curator from Scotland, traces the history of needlework across eras, and explores the expressive possibilities and diverse uses of fabric, needle and thread. Her book is about the social, artistic, political and emotional significance of sewing and embroidery. 
It is a wide-ranging account of the ways needle works of all kinds have mattered and made meaning throughout history, and it is a chronicle of memory, identity, power, politics, protest, loss, and recovery. Above all, it is a book about our inhernet human need to tell stories, no matter the medium, and the power of needlework to do this. Sewing and embroidery have not only being a means to create works of beauty, but also a subversive art that has allowed individuals and collectives to express themselves, communicate ideas and emotions, protest, connect generationally, and record historical events. Mostly women, but also many men, have used the language of needlework to make their voices heard, even in very difficult circumstances.
Hunter uses the history of needlework as a lens to explore human history and historical events, with an emphasis on sewing as a means of expression for the hurt, marginalized, impoverished or silenced. She has selected evocative titles for her 16 chapters: Unknown, Power, Frailty, Captivity, Identity, Connection, Protect, Journey, Protest, Loss, Community, Place, Value, Art, Work, & Voice. In each chapter she animates historical figures, movements and events, and she writes about both the sewn creations of particular historical figures or individual stitchers, as well as, the collective efforts and histories of different groups and peoples. She moves across centuries and continents from medieval Europe to Southern America and the USA, from African tribes and Asian cultures to Scotland, her homeland, while simultaneously situating her own journey and experiences, creating an autobiographical thread that runs through all the chapters.
Hunter draws on different geographic regions and historical eras to demonstrate how needlework has contributed to communities, and religious and political movements, and how stitching has been used for survival, solace, commemoration, and a means pf protest and awareness-raising. She also makes visible the two aspects of needlework: work for public display and work of a more intimate and personal nature. Finally, she provides a plethora of examples to support her arguments.
She begins with the famous Bayeux Tapestry, “a precious cultural relic deemed worthy of special safeguarding by UNESCO.” The Bayeux Tapestry, an embroidered narrative cloth with 58 numbered scenes depicted in linen cloth and wool yarn, “the simplest of material,” tells the story of the Battle of Hastings in 1066, and is “at heart a morality tale: a warning of the cost of betrayal.” Hunter traces the long history and adventures of the cloth. When Germany invaded France, Heinrich Himmler appropriated the tapestry and in 1944 he had it secreted in a basement of the Louvre; however, when his guards arrived to take the tapestry, the Louvre was already in the hands of the French Resistance, and thus, it remained in France. She suggests that it’s the tapestry’s story rather than its stitching that saved it, its political rather than cultural worth. She also considers the creators of the cloth and notes that even though their needlework might be of historical value, collected by museums, its anonymous women embroiderers remain uncelebrated. She conjures up an image of how these women would have sat for hours, months and years on end, their bodies aching and their eyes smarting with the fire smoke and candlelight, bent over a rectangular frame, some sewing upside down, under the pressure of an overseer.
In her chapter, Power, but also throughout the book, she succeeds in illustrating the intrinsic link between historical events and the art of stitches. She explores Mary, Queen of Scots’needlework story. Mary was a talented embroiderer, who created and displayed a magnificent “armoury of textiles” from her early years in France up to her execution in 1587. During her long years of captivity, her exquisite embroidery, embroidery written in secret codes, provided her with an outlet for her energy and creativity, gave her strength and carried her messages to the outside world. Her work became her emotional and political representative, and her stitched signatures asserted royal rights and claims. Hunter concludes that while Mary used needlework “to assert her sovereign power and campaign for her reinstatement, perhaps there also lay behind her stitching a more basic human impulse: to maintain self-control, create order and exercise choice among the tumult and humiliation of her life.”
Another example of this intricate link between political events, needlework and art, concerns the suffragettes’ deliberate decision, in the early 20th century, to create and carry banners “sewn in ravishing needlework, employing the most beautiful of fabrics — brocades, silks, damasks, and velvets — and using materials deliberately displaced from the privacy of the drawing room to the public arena of demonstration.” Mary Lowndes, for instance, “set up the Artists’ Suffrage League to supply the suffragette cause with bold, eye-catching campaigning artwork.” In 1911 one of Ann Macbeth’s banners was embroidered with eighty signatures of suffragettes that had been incarcerated and force fed in Holloway Prison. Towards the end of the book Hunter notes how stitched signatures are the physical marks of individual or collective insistence on being recognised and how signing textiles amplifies individual voices. She writes: “… people have embroidered their signatures on textiles to register their existence or record a common trauma in indelible sewing which leaves a lasting impression.”
In her chapter Frailty, Hunter explores needle work as a means of healing, recovery, and mere survival. She provides examples of people, women and men, in severe physical and / or mental pain that were able through sewing to find a voice, retain their sense of identity or sense of purpose and record events or personal experience. John Craske, for instance, was a third-generation fisherman, who during WWI caught influenza, which developed into a brain abscess. He was hospitalised, briefly moved to a lunatic asylum, and then sent back home incapacitated, to his wife, prey to episodes of amnesia. He painted small objects and boats to make a living, but when he became increasingly bed-ridden and couldn’t paint lying down, his wife taught him some rudimentary embroidery stitches. Through sewing, John discovered that cloth and thread allowed him to create the texture of the sea, which he loved so much, and the softness of sand dunes, even more tangibly than paint. Near the end of his life he began work on his most ambitious embroidery, The Evacuation of Dunkirk, a panorama of war pandemonium.
During, and after World War I, sewing provided support and healing to soldiers suffering with PTSD, then known as shell shock. Hunter notes that for the men who returned home from the carnage of the First World War, new approaches to healing were necessary, and so occupational therapy was born. She writes: “Handicrafts played a major role in therapeutic post-war rehabilitation. Through a coalition of government, voluntary and medical authorities, artists and craft workers were recruited to organise projects, workshops, exhibitions and commissions…..” and even though sewing “seemed the least likely candidate for male recuperation, yet it was embroidery that became the absorbing occupation for thousands of ex-servicemen, affording them not just the satisfaction of skilled accomplishment, but also a means to boost self-worth and earn a little income.”
In her chapter, Captivity, Hunter refers to humanitarian Elizabeth Fry, who is credited with first introducing needlework into prisons, as an antidote to powerlessness and means of creative self-expression. A century later, during the Second World War, at the fall of the Singapore to the Japanese in 1942, women prisoners of war used sewing as a subterfuge to stay in contact with their men, to resist and retain a sense of identity.The conditions were dire and dehumanizing, and uncertainty and malnutrition, brutality, disease and death were everyday experiences. Ethel Mulvaney suggested they make patchwork quilts, which they convinced their captors were humanitarian gifts to comfort patients in the prison hospital. Each small square was to have a sewn autograph and a personal image. Some were made by girls aged 8 to 16. One girl’s most subversive piece was an image of the Japanese flag, which she entitled The Flag of Tyranny. Hunter comments that even though its discovery would have meant punishment and possible execution, she still stitched out her truth.
Many men also sewed in the Second World War POW camps. Sewing kits known as a ‘housewife,’were included in the occupational parcels provided to soldiers by the Red Cross. Major Alexis Casdaglis ran sewing classes for fellow prisoners in his camp in Germany. Hunter writes: “He unravelled wool from old jumpers to cross-stitch defiance,” and sent embroideries to his son and family via Portugal, a neutral country. More recently, writer, Tracy Chevalier, commissioned The Sleep Quilt, which is entirely stitched and quilted by prisoners, mostly male, in some of Britain’s toughest jails. Fine Cell Work is the charity that made the quilt possible. Each of the 63 squares explores what sleep means in prison. Sleep has a great significance in prisons because it is that more difficult to find, in these noisy, hot and cramped environments. Also, for some it is a moment of escape and peace, but for others a return to all that hurts or they most regret in life [See at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx_0VQ4Vj78].
Esther Krintz and her younger sister survived the Holocaust and the unfortnate fate of her whole family by pretending to be Catholics and hiding. Hunter tells us that we know her story because she sewed it down. Long after the events, when living in America with her family she created her beautiful embroided memoir, choosing “sewing as an act of restoration.” She has included the scene when the Nazis arrived in Mniszek in the fall of 1939, her mother in her apron standing in front of her house with the lace curtained windows, her grandfather’s shoe lying where it had fallen off his foot as he was dragged by the Nazis, she and her sister in their pretty frocks and plaited hair witnessing the scene. Needlework takes time and requires patience and care. The process must have been painful and one of remembering, feeling, commemoration, sublimation of the pain into something beautiful, and also, creating a visual history for future generations.
Hunter reminds us that during the German occupation of Holland women had played an equally courageous role as men through civilian resistance. In 1946 many new women’s organisations were formed. During the war Mies Boissevain-van Lennep had helped Jewish citizens and as a consequence had her house raided by the Nazis. Her husband, four children and nephew were all killed, and she was incarcerated in a camp, in which by 1945 over 90,000 women and children had died. Hunter writes that after the war Mies called on women to make what she called the ‘skirt of life’ or the ‘liberation skirt.’ This commemorative skirt was made of old, colourful patches, sewn on to an older skirt so that the original background disappeared. The women were to weave the pattern of their life into their skirt, and the hem had to consist of orange triangles with the date May “5th, 1945” and the dates of national holidays, on which the skirt was worn, sewn into it.
In her chapter on Identity, Hunter claims that “embroidery is often the last remnant of identity to be salvaged by the dispossessed.” She describes how displaced Palestinian women in refugee camps, initially, safeguarded their particular village stitches, but then began to mix styles indicating the change that had taken place, and also, the need to strengthen a national identity or consciousness. The Hmong, an Asian ethnic group that have faced “centuries of ethnic division, warfare and enforced migration,” have told their stories of rural life, village bombardments, jungle marches, the treacherous crossing of the Mekong River and meagre existence in refugee camp,” through story cloths. Women in these contexts also sew to earn a little income. Hunter claims that needlework is often used as a first step to empowering women to determine ways to improve their status and diminish the social controls and economic dependency that limit their well-being and progress; however, she adds that their motive is not solely financial because embroidery and sewing re-thread a sense of identity, reclaim a culture, and keep future generations in touch with their heritage.
Under Pinochet’s harsh rule in Chile women created colourful arpilleras, embroideries sewn on burlap, to send word to the outside world of deprivation and the suppression of human rights, and to tell the stories of kidnapped family members. At first, the regime overlooked this activity as innocent craft-making, and not tools of subversion, but once they became aware of what was actually going on, women were followed and houses were raided. She also discusses how oppressors’ assertion of power has frequently been enforced through the suppression of traditional dress.When, for instance, the Soviet Union repressed the embroidering of ethnic designs and symbols and the wearing of national costume in Ukraine, they succeeded in “engineer[ing] a natural loss of embroidery practice and knowledge,” which had to be reclaimed and adapted to contemporary times after independence. She examines the frequent detrimental effects of missionary or imperial incursions that forced changes to indigenous dress, crafts and traditions in Africa, the Herero tribe, in particular. And in China the Cultural Revolution banned what was termed the Four Old Things: old customs, old culture, old ideas and old habits, and an obligatory uniformity in dress was imposed.
In her chapter, Connection, Hunter writes about the 18th century “billet books” from London’s Foundling Hospital. Mothers, mostly impoverished and unmarried, who left their newborns there were “encouraged to leave tokens, both as a memento and as proof of parentage” in case they were ever able to come back for their children. These tokens were tiny, just an inch or two of cloth snipped from the mother’s clothes. She writes: “Many are grimed in dirt, some thinned with wear, most dulled by poverty. . . . One child was left a pale blue satin-soft rosette. In the company of the other, more austere tokens, it appeared as luxuriant as a full-blown rose.” Hunter conxludes that the result is an intensely heartbreaking record of “that moment of choosing, of mothers deciding what remnant of themselves to leave, how best to communicate love, regret, hope, a small explanation to the child they will never see again,” but one woman, Sarah Bender, was able to come back eight years later, “clutching her half of an embroidered heart and was reunited with her son.”
She opens her chapter, Place, by referring to Scottish singer and story gatherer Alison McMorland’s 1994 project on the island of Mull, in the Inner Hebrides, in which she recorded the memories of the island’s oldest residents. These recollections were then transformed first into a painting by Edinburgh based artist, Kate Downie, and then into a textile by Hebridean spinner, weaver and dyer, Flora McDonald. In the same chapter Hunter talks about 18th-century stitched globes and maps sewn by schoolgirls that had gained popularity from 1770 onwards in Europe and North America, in an age when geography, “a narrative that explored the cultural, economic, religious and hierarchical social organisation of different continents,” was an important part of the school curriculum and there was “a growing appetite for lists, for quantitative rather than qualitative data, for precise details of size and scale.” Additionally, Hunter writes that in America embroidery was to play a significant role in recording its altered consciousness after its independence, and that girls were invited through education to have a place in the civic evolution of their country. It was through embroidery that they first made their mark. She also refers to more recent community map making, and suggests that “In community map-making, time can conflate: it is possible to layer knowledge and memory, insert lost landmarks, reinstate hidden paths, reinstall the ghosts of vanished architecture.”
Through her community work with groups from different cultures in dofferent countries, Hunter has found that “When a cultural language is threatened, or forbidden, its distinct vocabulary is often preserved through needlework as an alternative visual script. When the Welsh language was banned in Welsh schools, people conserved it on sewn samplers.” She has observed that the loss of culture, when people have, for instance, been forcibly removed from their homeland, is not relinquished by people, but translated into other forms. She writes: “So it was with African American slaves: they kept hold of cultural memory by translating it into mediums where it could be kept safe.” She considers the siginificance of place in the “syncopated, free-spirited” quilts made by enslaved people in North America. Not many slave quilts have survived, since they were made with cheap or already worn fabric; however, two that have survived were made by Harriet Powers, born in 1837. They are “a fusion of American quilt-making, Christian imagery and African traditions,” and are known as The Bible Quilt and The Pictorial Quilt. Hunter notes that they offer a unique insight into the visual vocabulary of enslaved women and provide indisputable evidence that African American slaves carried their visual culture with them and used sewing to preserve it.
In her reference to Judy Chicago’s famous installation, The Dinner Party, Hunter comments that the significance of the artists designs and commissioned embroidery got lost in the mostly male critical fixation on the dinner plates, but the plates were only a part of this overall work, which also included “large fabric runners to each place setting which referenced–symbolically and pictorially–each woman’s chronological place in history and provided greater insight to their narratives.” Each runner was researched and a wide variety of needlework techniques were used and many embroiders were employed. For instance, the runner, dedicated to the female Egyptian pharaoh, Hatsepsut, was embroided with hieroglyphic characters and it took two years to complete.
Hunter also sheds lights on the working conditions of embroiders and seamstresses over different historical periods, and includes elements like economics, class and race in her discussion. In her chapter, Work, she focuses on major shifts that were brought about in the working lives of people who worked with fabric and thread, during specific eras, and the “increasing public concern about the inhumane conditions suffered by the working poor” in Britain, Scotland and Irleand. She also discusses the changes that the invention of the sewing machine brought about, which didn’t ultimately free people from labor, but instead changed the pace and nature of the work. On the one hand, it did give women an opportunity for independence, financial freedom, and the possibility to run their own workshops. On the other hand, women lost the sociability that needleworkers had enjoyed because until the invention of the sewing machine, sewing had mostly been companionable, whether women worked in group settings or at home with family. Now it became a solitary occupation at home, or the toil of factory workers sewing amid the clang and clatter of machinery. Also, sewing machines rather than alleviating exploitation exacerbated it. In the textile industries women were cheaper labor and largely un-unionised. Hunter quotes Karl Marx, who in his book, Das Kapital, foresaw the devastation the arrival of the sewing machine would wreak on textile workers.
She comments that time and sexism have been needlework’s two great antagonists, due to the inherent fragility of these works of art made of thread and fabric, that are vulnerable to fading, fraying and tearing, and to museum curators’s tendency to reject pieces and collections that often get lost for ever. At other instances, women’s achievements, have either been subsumed into their male partners’ careers, or otherwise discounted and ignored. In her chapter, Value, Hunter expands on the lives and achievements of three artists Mary Delany, Mary Knowles and Mary Linwood, who “crossed the threshold of the exclusive world of male fine art to revitalise the artistic and commercial value of sewn art. They attracted royal patronage, exhibited widely, and made money and reputations as artists. But their time in the sun was temporary, their sewn masterpieces now forgotten.” Charles Dickens wrote a poignant elegy after a visit he made to see Linwood’s textural re-interpretations of the masterpieces of Gainsborough or Rubens offered by her needle painting.
In this chapter, Hunter traces the gender politics and history of the importance and value of needlework. In the 19th century, for instance, soldiers and tailors restored needlework’s value as an artistic pursuit; however, these men chose not to call themselves ‘embroiderers.’ Stokes, for instance, a war veteran and invalid, illustrated The Battle of Cairo in nearly 10,000 scraps of fabric, which he had stitched together while ‘in a lying position.’ Hunter notes that these works were not only an exemplar of male artistry and industry; they were also made to support a movement that advocated sobriety amongst the working classes. In particular after the Crimean War, in which both sides suffered cataclysmic losses, there was an escalating alcohol addiction amongst soldiers, and needlework was fostered as an alternative to drink.
In her chapter, Art, she traces the history, mostly in Scotland, of the elevation of needlework to art needlework. She claims that art was emphatically a male preserve and women had been barred from membership of art institutions, societies and clubs, and excluded from the Royal Academy in Britain. They were restricted observers of the world they lived in and with few opportunities to interpret it through their art. She writes: “Women on the cusp of the twentieth century were intent on broadening their professional and political horizons and with the suffragette movement gathering momentum, the endeavours of Glasgow’s aspiring women artists were lending support to a wider social change by using their art to make the talents and achievements of women more visible.” Now, she writes, an individualistic stamp and exploration of materials and their effect were encouraged, and Jessie Newbery, among many others, an active supporter of the suffragette cause became involved in initiatives to bolster the place of women in society and secure visibility for women’s art. Hunter claims that Newbery heralded a new consciousness of the sensual potential of surface stitchery, unloosed from tradition.
Hunter weaves her own story into each chapter, especially, in the last one with the title, Voice. She reflects on the question: “Why did my mother, so hard-pressed with the toil of housework and the rearing of four children, take time to sit patiently by my side and induct me in the intricacies of embroidery….?” And responds: “I believe now that she wanted to find a way to keep me occupied. Although never boisterous, I was forged from a curious spirit, ever questioning, wanting to explore the small world around me. My inquisitiveness claimed an excessive share of her attention. The absorption of needlework encouraged me to be stiller, quieter. But it also gave me another way to express myself.” I pondered on whether to situate my own relavant experiences and reflections on the links between me and a generation gone, my mother and aunts, and my primary school crafts teacher, but decided against it due to the length of the post. In some sense, needle and thread “stitch” generations together through the passing down of both creations and skills, from mothers to daughters. Maybe I will return to this, as it turns out, interesting and broader than I thought topic, in the future.
In this chapter Hunter expands on the possibilities of needle and thread as a visual language and the power it has to give people a voice, but also on the ways that oppressors have appropriated sewing to disempower and diminish others. For instance, sewing was used by the Nazis to silence a people. One of their strategies was “destruction through work.” In one context, in 1940 the Nazis corralled over 160,000 Jews, children included, who were forced to sew from morning till evening with only one daily ration of 700 calories. By 1945 few had survived. She also mentions that in 1631, John Taylor advised “the tempering of women’s speech through their needlework.” An exhortation, she writes, that “was zealously seized upon by the educators of schoolgirls, as an effective way to temper the supposedly febrile female spirit.”
I think that after reading the book one becomes much more aware of the great potential of fabric, needle and thread. Summarily, needlework can: become a metaphor for life, record history, convey complex social information, conserve memory, protect and preserve personal and collective testimonies, trace out a map, convey a prayer, celebrate a culture, commemorate lives lived and lost, heal and empower, provide a means to create art, generate income, support women’s independence, give voice, proclaim a manifesto, preserve a cultural language, and maintain identity. It can also be a means of protest and documentation. Hunter writes that during apartheid in South Africa, the resistance fighter Ruth First was the first white woman to be incarcerated in solitary confinement for 117 days. By the time she was assassinated in 1982 she had published a short autobiography in which she documented her days of sensory deprivation and the significance of her embroidery to maintain her identity and express her sense of self. Finally, it can serve as a link between generations: “Needlework which remained within families or tribal groups was cherished as emotional and cultural connectors between generations.”
