Fancy Work

Blending biography, memoir and art criticism, Fancy Work: Unpicking Past Lives explores the ever-shifting tensions between family, labour and gender through the history of embroidery, or ‘fancy work’. At the heart of the book is Alice Hattrick’s encounter with the embroidery designer May Morris and her circle: from her father William Morris to her mother Jane, an artists’ model and embroiderer herself, and M.F., May’s gender non-conforming partner for twenty years. Searching for guidance, Hattrick looks to May’s life – alongside others who have found, in textiles, a means of resistance – to understand better their own queer identity, family ties and fractious working conditions in an ableist society. In the ephemeral nature of textiles, Hattrick finds a mirror to archival research. How can the past help us to imagine alternative domestic circumstances and create unconstrained lives of our own, especially when not all traces remain? Expansive in thought, form and time, Fancy Work is a radical and thrilling work that reminds us that we can think differently, inviting us to place the needle in our own hands and stitch ourselves a loop in the chain.