Historian and hand quilter Deb McGuire ‘reframes’ the history of the British quilt, revealing the deep roots of the practice of quilting in a frame. McGuire’s practice-informed approach foregrounds the crucial yet often overlooked distinctions between the techniques of patchwork and quilting which reveal very different regional narratives in Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland, England and Scotland. In telling the history of quilting(v) rather than of the quilt(n) the lecture will explore the ways in which researchers’ attention to the practices of making in material culture and practice-based methodologies can reanimate meaning in complex objects like the quilt. Situating quilting within theories of labour, emotions and crafted creativity, the seminar will centre the bodies of makers as it explores how the haptic and tacit experiences of making live on in the detailed margins of the historical object and record. McGuire places the knowledge and skills of makers back within the social and geographic landscapes where quilts were made, disrupting narratives shaped by object-based historical collecting policies. This approach brings back into focus a rich inherited cultural practice, and the matrilineal and ecological networks and agency that surrounded quilting practice, revealing a more diverse and nuanced reimagining of the quilters of the British Isles as it invites new ways to curate the quilt in museum and community settings.
As part of the lecture McGuire will share her work with Dr Jess Bailey (University of Edinburgh) co-directing Within the Frame (https://www.withintheframe.co.uk/). An academic research project and heritage preservation effort, the project uses social and art histories as tools to build networks of revival across the ecosystem of carpentry, wool production and needlework, a localised network that once supported quilting in a frame as a thriving form of artistic expression and economic agency in the British Isles.
The research seminar will include a short demonstration of the skilled practice of quilting in a traditional frame and the opportunity to both view and touch extant nineteenth-century British quilts.
Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Trinity Term 2025
Fridays, 12pm-1.30pm (Weeks 1-4)
In person at the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre (entry via Robinson Close).
Convened by Dr Beth Hodgett and Dr Christopher Morton
