Another month, another book - this time the subject is lace. Five years ago, I researched the lives of Victorian social reformers, Josephine Butler, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and Octavia Hill for an exhibition inspired by lace from the Gawthorpe Textiles collection. This is a reproduction of the same piece.
It is a lady's cuff: machine embroidered net decorated with hand-made paper couronnes. Hand cuffs to bind Victorian women, financially to their husbands, intellectually to the expectations of society and physically by a well-defined sense of duty. With limited means of expression, I imagined a Victorian woman stitching I dream of escape and set me free, unobtrusively working the words into the decoration. The key motif is reminiscent of a chaterlaine worn by a house-keeper (the only suitable job for a woman). The paper couronnes are fashioned from old books, alluding to the power of the written word to change the status quo.
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