Fancy Work : Unpicking Past Lives

What can a scrap of embroidery tell us about how to live?How can the past help us imagine unconstrained lives when not all traces remain? To explore these questions, Alice Hattrick turns to the embroidery designer May Morris and her circle: from her father William Morris to her mother Jane, an artist’s model and embroiderer herself, and M.F., May’s gender non-conforming partner of twenty years.Through this queer encounter with the Arts and Crafts movement, Hattrick shifts attention away from celebrated designers and towards intimacy, labour and domestic life.Looking to May – alongside others who have found in textiles a means of resistance – Hattrick traces connections between these histories and their own queer identity, family ties and precarious working conditions within an ableist society.Expansive in thought, form and time, Fancy Work stitches together archival fragments, domestic spaces and contemporary sites of struggle, insisting on the political force of often overlooked acts of defiance.