The secret sewing of soldiers and slaves
Clare Hunter, banner-maker, textile artist and curator, dreams about textiles.
In her sleep, she runs her hands across fabrics, relishing the tactile textures of brocades, grazing her knuckles on ‘a crust of beading, smoothing down lengths of fringing, stroking the Braille of lace’.
She wakes bereft, ‘with a sharp pang of loss’ for these imaginary fabrics because there is ‘no hope for their rediscovery’.
In the waking world, the fate of embroidered fabric can be just as fraught, frayed into nothingness by time, abandoned in attics and casually dismissed as women’s work.
Hunter has set about restoring the reputation of textile art in this very personal, but fascinating, history of the world, where sewing (for her) has profound ‘social, emotional and political significance’. She begins her story with the iconic Bayeux tapestry, itself nearly lost once to French revolutionaries who thought it would make a good cover for a military wagon in 1792, and then again two years later, when it was saved from being cut up to make a fetching backdrop for the Goddess of reason in a local carnival.
the work is nearly 70 metres long and it tells the tale of the 1066 Battle of Hastings. there’s history stitched large — the death of King Harold, the triumph of William — but there are also domestic descriptions, the smallest of details: ‘the pattern on a cushion [and] the liquid spill from a pitcher’ nestle alongside farming scenes, harvests, hunts, fleeing soldiers, felled horses and slain unarmored archers.
unknown women painstakingly sewed the tapestry, but in a roll call of 632 men, 200 horses and 55 dogs, there’s an almost complete lack of female characters — there are just six women in total.
Hunter’s book is packed with such intriguing detail.
She describes the sumptuousness of religious embroidery, rich with rubies, diamonds and pearls, sewn with sequins ‘ that would tremble and glitter’ in cathedral candlelight, as well as the showiness of Henry VIII’s infamous Field of the Cloth of Gold, where one tree was hung with 2,000 satin cherries and the kings ‘were dressed in the finest tissue of gold spun from the beards of mussel’.
She explains how Mary, Queen of Scots, an avid embroiderer, sewed gifts for elizabeth I as a plea for sisterhood, but
also as a commentary on her imperilled life, stitching ‘ a baleful ginger cat regarding a scurrying mouse’.
It is making with a message, an idea that repeats itself in the history of needlework — from the Suffragettes’ banners, to the plain white headscarves stitched with the names of lost children worn by the mothers of the Disappeared in Seventies argentina, and the (still growing) aIDS memorial quilt, thought to be the largest piece of community folk art in the world.
Hunter writes insightfully of the ways in which needlework can provide solace and a sense of community, such as with the beautifully embroidered seascapes of fisherman John Craske, who, like many wounded World War I soldiers, used sewing to improve his mental health. For african-american slaves, quilting was a way of keeping hold of cultural memory in danger of being lost. They plucked enough cotton to pad a quilt, gathered bark, berries and blossom for dyeing, unpicked grain sacks and worn-out clothes, and sewed them in traditional patterns that hint at plots of earth as seen from the sky.
There is even a theory that these quilts held ‘encoded information’ for slaves who were heading to freedom on the Underground railroad — when hung on a washing line, they might signal a safe house, or danger ahead.
Threads Of Life is a vivid, thoughtprovoking book, so it’s an annoying snag that there are no illustrations or photographs in the book of the works that survive.
readers must search in a threadbare list of museum websites for that small royal mouse looking for a bolthole, an unarmored archer and the boundless, braided sea of Craske’s embroideries.