Embroidering and the Body Under Threat: Suffragette Embroidered Cloths Worked in Holloway Prison, 1911-1912

Between 1911 and 1912 hundreds of suffragettes were incarcerated in Holloway Prison for participating in the window breaking campaign. Denied political status, some suffragettes used the hunger strike as a political tool and were forcibly fed. Whilst in prison some of the women hand-embroidered small, intimately scaled cloths.

This research asks why, in cramped, isolated and physically threatening circumstances did the women choose to embroider through cloth?

By approaching the artefacts as material objects and through a material practice, a new epistemic space is examined, where a more textured understanding of the experiences of suffragettes under threat and a reconfiguration of what it means to embroider can ensue. By focusing on the practice of embroidering as the basis for the study and grounded in the ontology of ‘New Materialism’, this research positions the significance of the matter of the body, thread and cloth and the material process of embroidering, in the representation and making of knowledge.

The research contends that embroidering is an embodied practice, which articulates the thinking-feeling body beyond and in excess of symbolic language and visual imagery. Underpinned with the psychoanalytical writings of Didier Anzieu and Nicola Diamond, cloth is asserted as a projected ‘cloth-skin-body’ where the embroidering thread can negotiate the formation and repair of the self and engender thinking.

In addition, the study probes how the tactile and material act of embroidering by suffragettes was a subversive, dangerous and micro, proto-political practice.

The research has been carried out through the creation of a body of hand-embroidered textiles for exhibition and through archival and theoretical investigation. The submission takes the form of a public exhibition of the textiles and a written thesis that also includes a full visual record of the textile works.