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My current research Small Archives: quiltmakers and their craft ethnographically explores the skilled community of quiltmakers in the Northwest of England, following the themes of creativity, personal collections and material memories. This project will work to untangle the cat’s cradle of lines that lattice together myths, textiles and the domestic space and consider quiltmaking as a relationship between material and maker that produces tangible biographies. An increased gender analysis within material culture has shifted attention to the artefacts of women’s labour and the value they have in understanding their everyday lives, relationships, and social standing. I am conducting fieldwork within Gleneagles Ps and Qs quilting bee as an active member investigating the storytelling that emanates from the communal practice of stitching, showing and touching quilts. This project will work to enable us to access these touchable, living stories, to reach out and come into contact with the sum of human endeavour, marked and concentrated in stitches and patchwork blocks. I will investigate how to further elucidate how tactile autobiographies provide access to the afterlife, to envisioned futures, inch and hours in squares and scraps mixed and muddled with dreams, worries, fears and secrets. A theme of storytelling, imaginatively composing narratives of everyday lives lived and retold through the material, emerges through engaging in object biographies. This essay works to unpick the network between crafters, their tools of making and their objects of creation. |
Small Archives: quiltmakers and their craft
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Works Published
Donohue, L. (2023). 'The Sewing box: a portrait chronicle' in TEXT. Volume 50.The Textile Society.
Donohue, L. and Spicer, G. (2023). Colouring In : The Past. In Black, S. & Vormittag, L. (Eds.) Colouring In, [online] (3), pp.89–91.UAL and Kingston School of Art .Available at:https://www.academia.edu/106613950/Colouring_In_The_Past?source=swp_share
Donohue, L. and Spicer, G. (2023). Colouring In : The Past. In Black, S. & Vormittag, L. (Eds.) Colouring In, [online] (3), pp.89–91.UAL and Kingston School of Art .Available at:https://www.academia.edu/106613950/Colouring_In_The_Past?source=swp_share
