by CAROLINE THORNHAM
I first picked up embroidery about a year ago, at a time when I was frequently feeling low and agitated. I was only looking for a way to DIY some floral jeans on a budget, but as I set about learning stitches off Pinterest, I found that I’d hit upon something more. When I felt knotted up inside, the process of unravelling threads, and interweaving them to create patterns and order soothed me. Instead of feeling myself unspool into a looping mess of abstract anxieties which threatened to overwhelm my sense of being present, I found a medium which could centre me with its physicality. It lessened the power my thoughts had to dissociate me from reality when I made them become a part of the physical world on my own terms, turning ideas into tangible objects and images. Embroidery chimed precisely with the metaphorical language of threads, knots and tangles I had instinctively reached for to describe my feelings in words.
Quickly, I became inspired by embroidery artists I found online, such as Michelle Kingdom, who specialises in stitching what she calls “psychological landscapes,” and Hannah Hill (aka @hanecdote), who explores feminism, mental health, body positivity and grime music in painstakingly precise needlework. I had found embroidering to be an empowering experience, and I admired the wide range of artists carving out their space in the art world through the same medium. However, despite the current embroidery renaissance online, artists are still having to work to overcome the medium’s historical associations with femininity and frivolity in the western cultural imagination. In 2016, Hill found internet fame with her stitched version of the angry Arthur meme, which expressed her frustration that “historically, embroidery hasn’t been taken seriously as a medium because it’s ‘women’s work’”. Routinely, news articles reporting on current embroidery artists invoke the tagline “this is not your grandmother’s embroidery!” attesting to the continuation of the cliché that embroidery is feminine, domestic, and old-fashioned, even as they attempt to debunk it. As “women’s work,” embroidery is denied the status of high art and relegated to a lower place in the aesthetic hierarchy reserved for ‘crafts’ and domestic labour, while gendering it as essentially feminine draws upon misogynistic notions of passivity and frivolity to undermine its status as legitimate ‘work’, erasing the very real role embroidery has had as a source of income for women historically.
Far from being merely a ladylike hobby for silent Victorian schoolgirls, embroidery has a wide-ranging, complex, and international history which can be dated back as far as the 5th century BC. From the Central Andes region c.200BC to the gold threads of medieval Germany, or from ancient Chinese chain-stitch technique to the Mughal Empire in the 1700s, embroidery has had a legacy as rich and expressive as any other art form, and, as the Oxford Online Art database points out, it “has always been done by men as well as women”. So how has 21st century Britain retained such a limited conception of the medium? In her book The Subversive Stitch, Rozika Parker points to the Renaissance as a possible origin point for the convergence of embroidery with ideologies of femininity in European thought. At a time when economic and class distinctions were leading to the emergence of a division between fine arts (painting, sculpture, etc.) and crafts (e.g. furniture making), embroidery was increasingly being done by middle and working class “women amateurs, working from the home without pay”. Fine arts, by comparison, were largely (although not exclusively) carried out by men, who were paid in a professional sphere. As the art/craft distinctions became increasingly entrenched into the eighteenth century, this coincided with the growth of ideologies which sought to define femininity and characterise it as essential and natural to women. Although not all embroidery was done by women, the eighteenth century saw British perceptions of the medium become enmeshed in its ideological conception of normative ‘feminine’ behaviour. The Victorians used the embroideries of the Medieval era to justify their own theories of what constituted appropriate feminine behaviour, exploiting the figure of the passive, embroidering damsel, while at the same time recasting the division of labour in medieval embroidery to argue that the most skilled ecclesiastical embroideries must have been done by men. Meanwhile, embroidery’s class associations shifted towards upper class women, erasing the role of working-class embroiderers and refiguring it as a domestic leisure activity even further removed from the professional sphere of fine art.
Obviously this summary is an oversimplification; the relationship between embroidery and gender has always been more complex than this. However, the associations between embroidery and conventional femininity still predominate today, and understanding their socially constructed origins even in general terms can help illuminate some of the conflicting responses artists and feminists have had to the medium at the time and in the years since. Some women sought to distance themselves from embroidery entirely, such as the novelist Adeline Sargent, who said in 1893, “I have done some elaborate embroidery in my time but now I never use the needle for amusement, only for necessity”. Her rejection of embroidery and its associated triviality and femininity is intended to assert her own seriousness, but also reinforces the idea that the art is inherently gendered. Others who sought to rehabilitate embroidery’s reputation often did so in terms which served to ultimately support the status quo designating it as feminine, such as some nineteenth-century novelists like May Sinclair, who used embroidery as a symbol of traditionally feminine purity in her writing.
Many contemporary artists have received attention for their efforts to challenge the status quo on embroidery, such as Ghada Amer, who combines painting and needlework to destabilise the hierarchized and gendered distinctions between the two mediums. However, the preconceived notions of embroidery as inherently passive, feminine or domestic have never fully reflected the nature of what people were actually stitching, and using embroidery as a medium for empowering or subversive art is not new. Even at the height of Victorian era Britain, women were choosing to stitch the most rebellious female saints, while the meticulously embroidered banners of the suffragettes have become iconic. Moreover, identifying this particular idea of embroidery as originating in a white, British, patriarchal context demonstrates how limited it is, as not only misogynistic but also Eurocentric and ignorant of the enormous range of significances embroidery has held as an art form across the world, from the high art of China to the socially and politically important embroideries of Palestine.