Connected By Threads
Gill Crawshaw has created an illustrated essay that tells a story of disabled women and textiles. She makes connections between textile art created by contemporary disabled women artists and needlework produced by women incarcerated in institutions of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Like those people who turned to genealogy during lockdown to research their family history, Gill aims to show connectivity between one generation and the next, highlighting kinship, shared practices and traditions, driven by her curiosity about disabled needleworkers and textile artists.
Gill Crawshaw has created an illustrated essay that tells a story of disabled women and textiles. She makes connections between textile art created by contemporary disabled women artists and needlework produced by women incarcerated in institutions of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Like those people who turned to genealogy during lockdown to research their family history, Gill aims to show connectivity between one generation and the next, highlighting kinship, shared practices and traditions, driven by her curiosity about disabled needleworkers and textile artists.
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Mary Frances Heaton,
Patterns for silk
pocket books from
1842 to 1846, no date
Linen with cotton thread
Photo courtesy of the
Mental Health Museum
Sandra Wyman, Turning Ugly (detail), 2014
Hand-dyed cotton, cotton thread
Image description:
Designs showing both the
front and back of three silk
envelopes, mainly floral.
The title appears at the top,
and the sentence ‘Offered
to the Queen thro the
medium of Sir C. Wood’
runs down the centre of the
sampler, the text turned on
its side.
Image description:
Several hand-dyed quilted fabric in pinks, blues and purples. Text is
embroidered in lines that fill the top half, giving way to churning lines
below. The text reads: The two years that followed were the worst of
mine and my mother’s lives. To us it was an ugly place, a place of
emotional squalor, isolation and desperation. It was many years later
that I realised it was one of the most beautiful parts of the country.
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