Material world

Fashion in museums is proving a big draw for audiences, with the Christian Dior show at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), in London, becoming its most-visited exhibition ever. The show, which ran from 2 February to 1 September, attracted nearly 600,000 visitors, surpassing the former record set by 2015’s Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty by more than 100,000.

Away from blockbuster exhibitions about celebrity designers, however, textiles often have less of a high profile in museums. This is at least in part because they are often made by, and for, women, whose stories are less well documented, and whose work is too often dismissed as domestic and less interesting than high-value objects. 

But things are changing. Over the past few years, interest has grown in conserving, collecting and displaying not only historic textiles, but also contemporary textile art. In 2o17, the Turner Contemporary, in Margate, showcased the work of 40 women artists in its Entangled: Threads and Making exhibition. 

London’s Tate Modern, meanwhile, ushered in the centenary of the Bauhaus this year with the first major retrospective of the work of the weaver Anni Albers, who studied at the radical German school and played a pivotal role in the development of modern art and design. 

Cornelia Parker co-created her embroidered Magna Carta wiki page in 2015, while the Bayeux Tapestry’s proposed visit in 2022 should increase the focus on the UK’s many tapestry and textile collections. 

Textiles are starting to reveal unexpected and diverse stories of women as designers, commissioners, and makers, as well as of their wealthy owners and wearers.

Historic houses often feature sumptuous textiles. For instance, the National Trust’s Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire is home to Bess of Hardwick’s Five Virtuous Women tapestries and four appliqued wall hangings depicting “noble women of the ancient world”, as well as exquisite embroidery panels stitched by Mary, Queen of Scots. 

The Devonshire Hunting Tapestries also once hung in Hardwick Manor and are now in the V&A. More-modern textiles designed by the textile designer and social activist William Morris can be seen at National Trust Arts & Crafts houses such as Standen in West Sussex, while the exquisite embroideries at Wightwick Hall in the West Midlands were made by his daughter May. 

“Textiles are literally woven and stitched through the stories of our manors, mills and merchant houses,” says Emma Slocombe, a textile curator at the National Trust. 

“Bess of Hardwick was a female patron for textile commissions and a needlewoman in her own right. She was a strong, dynamic woman who used her textiles to create her own identity. So when visitors arrived at the hall, they would see not the typical heraldic symbols and devices related to great men depicted in tapestry, but these incredible hangings that said something about her in a male-dominated world.”

The domestic needlework created by women, the seat covers, samplers and household linen that are part of the hierarchy of a country house have always been less celebrated because the lives of the unnamed women who made them weren’t recorded. But they are now being researched where possible. 

“We want to explore more of these stories in many of our properties,” says Slocombe. “Next year, we will focus on the home, and this will give us an opportunity to explore this in depth. We are trying to draw out stories of women who were not part of the main story of a property, and feature the work of contemporary artists who have responded creatively to them.”

Away from historic houses, the Industrial Revolution had a major impact on the technology of textiles, and lots of museums and collections were founded in textile centres, particularly in northern England. 

Many of Lancashire’s cotton mills have lain empty for decades, but they were temporarily brought to life for the first British Textile Biennial, which is winding to a close in the former textile towns of Nelson, Burnley, Blackburn and Accrington. 

“People think they know the Pennine towns, the stories of the mills and looms, but there are different layers of heritage,” says Jenny Rutter, the deputy director of the arts organisation Super Slow Way, which is behind the biennial. “We are highlighting the rich textile heritage, but also the people who live here now and the vibrant contemporary creativity. The story didn’t end with the Industrial Revolution.”

The British Textile Biennial has worked with museums, taking advice from the People’s History Museum in Manchester on displaying banners. The biennial team also  facilitated a display at Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery of appliqued Indian quilts, which were handmade by women using the katab recycling technique. 

Textile artist Alice Kettle worked with refugee communities to create a large-scale stitched artwork, Thread Bearing Witness, which was displayed in the Great Barn at Gawthorpe Hall, in Lancashire. The space had never before been used for display, and the artwork complemented the hall’s own textile collection. 

Rutter says: “We display in buildings as diverse as cathedral crypts to empty shops, reimagining content and presenting it in new and unexpected ways, often as a way of connecting with people who would not normally go to museums, whether that’s white working-class blokes or women from southern Asian communities whose heritage is not reflected in many museums.” 

Textile artworks by female southern Asian artists are being collected by Uthra Rajgopal, assistant curator at Manchester’s Whitworth, with the help of a New Collecting Award of £38,600. “We have a lot of southern Asian textile pieces in our collection but there are only two named female artists,” she says. “The award will allow me to develop the research, working alongside mentors.”

Rajgopal hopes to visit artists’ studios across Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, but also aims to build links within the southern Asian diaspora of north-west England. 

“I want to discover more of the network here and understand how women artists are working,” says Rajgopal. “Some don’t have studios, and there are a lot of groups in the north-west who come together and relate their stories and journeys through art practice in textiles and fabrics. The ideas of memory, displacement and fragmentation are important themes in this context, and the collection needs to have the presence of these artworks.”

Paisley is another area of the UK that has textiles woven through its history. Its museum has the largest collection of Paisley shawls in the world, numbering 1,200. The venue is undergoing a major redevelopment that will enable up to five times as many of the shawls to be displayed. 

“While the shawls were popularised in Paisley, people don’t always make the link between the town and the shawls,” says Aileen Strachan, the content delivery manager at Paisley Museum Reimagined. “The redevelopment allows us to display many more shawls, but also to tell more diverse stories, not just about the women who wore them, but also the people who made them.” 

The shawls were initially the work of a cottage industry of crafts and handweaving in the town, although they were later mass produced. The museum’s interpretation will cover these personal, technical and economic layers of Paisley’s history, with shawls dispersed throughout the galleries to show how they fit into ancillary industries, often involving women. 

“We did some training with Glasgow Women’s Library, which helped us to analyse the stories we were telling and how we could represent different perspectives and groups,” says Strachan. 

“We want the museum to be a hub for creativity and skills, where the shawls can resonate with a broader audience. It’s an ambitious project – we will have an open storage facility, so that more of the shawls are accessible. We want the museum as a whole to be a community resource.”

The UK’s only dedicated wool museum is in Camarthernshire, Wales. The National Wool Museum, which opened in 1976, was relaunched in 2004, following a £2m refit part financed by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.  

Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, meanwhile, is trying to make the most of the textile heritage of the East Sussex village it’s in. This is being done through Ethel Mairet (1872-1952), who revived the almost-dead tradition of handloom weaving in the area.

“She may be less well known than more famous male artists such as Eric Gill, who also lived in the village,” says the museum’s curator, Donna Steele. “But she was very much engaged in the debate around craft and industry. Mairet believed in marrying traditional techniques, such as natural dyeing, with modern industrial processes. She was highly influential and progressed to weaving with modern materials such as cellophane.”  

Mairet was the starting point for the recent exhibition Women’s Work (now finished), for which the museum drew on the archives of the Craft Study Centre (CSC) at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham, Surrey. The show included woven and printed textiles, some of which had never been seen before. 

Some of the women who were featured are well known and have extensive archives at the CSC, such as textile designers Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher. They set up a successful textile printing workshop, and their former apprentice Enid Marx went on to design moquette seats for London Transport. 

But other female textile designers remain elusive. “It’s not always easy to find documentation and archival material on female artists,” says Steele. The museum has used an innovative way of finding out more about female artists from the inter-war period, by asking the public to introduce names to them on its designated Roll of Honour wall.  

“It’s about finding a modern context for these items and being transparent in what you are doing,” says Steele. “We may not know a lot, but people like it when you ask them to contribute, and it becomes an invitation for them to bring stories to us. For example, one visitor told us he had samples from some Barron and Larcher blocks, so we were able to add three incredibly rare framed textiles to the display.”

The debate continues as to whether weaving and sewing, and the wider revival of crafts, are feminist statements or a way of keeping women in their place. Weaving and sewing are particularly suited to participatory events, and many museums continue to collect and create new projects and works on this basis, showing how something that seems a submissive practice is often also a subversive act. 

Niran Tahhan was introduced to the Multaka project team in May 2018 through Connection Support, an organisation supporting new refugee families in Oxford, and was one of five volunteers who participated in the Connecting Threads exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum. 

“Multaka-Oxford was, and still is, my platform to share my culture and civilisation, as a refugee myself,” says Tahhan. “I’m really lucky to be part of this project. It gives me the great opportunity to see objects related to my country, Syria, in particular, but also to the Middle East in general. 

“My role was to describe a brocade silk scarf that I had donated to the museum in order to give back something of the support and encouragement I received from the museum team. I focused on the link between that material and the UK. The silk brocade of Damascus is a precious kind of fabric made from natural silk, and gold and silver threads, and is considered to be one of the most luxurious and distinctive gifts. 

“This fabric had a worldwide reputation for centuries and in 1947 it reached Buckingham Palace, where Queen Elizabeth II had her wedding gown made from silk brocade of silver and gold sent as a gift from Damascus. 

“The patterns on the brocade fabric were traditionally handwoven on traditional hand looms by skilled craftsmen, requiring a lot of effort and time. Then, the patient women of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan would draw and embroider the tiny stitches and many patterns.” 

Tahhan wrote the text to accompany her brocade scarf, part of which reads: “When memory stands on the threshold of the homeland, and you are at the top of longing and longing for it, you remember all the things that were there, and you enjoy them despite their simplicity. 

“The war leaves behind all your memories, dreams, past, future and all the beautiful things you used to have. In the midst of all this darkness, a dear friend surprises me by sending a gift from my homeland to become a precious treasure.”