Stunning stitches back in time at Quilts show

Vivid colours: Ann West’s appliquéd wool quilt from 1820
5 April 2012

In 1841, 180 female prisoners set sail on HMS Rajah for Australia supplied, by social reformer Elizabeth Fry, with big bags of printed cotton. On the trip they made the pretty, though technically unsophisticated, Rajah quilt, decorated with birds and flowers.

The idea that sewing is morally improving has always hampered stitched craft’s consideration as art. The predominance of women practitioners has not helped but the V&A’s new exhibition, Quilts (which has already outsold blockbuster shows Baroque and Maharaja), provides evidence of a type of artistry combined with technical achievement that is increasingly recognised as a legitimate art-form.

Abundance of time is a fundamental requirement of quilt-making. Yet while most of the minutely stitched and detailed quilts here were done by women, some men spent up to a decade on them, too. A parade-ground-sharp geometric patchwork on show here was worked by a soldier in India from thousands of uniform-wool hexagons just one centimetre across.

Pictorial quilts gave women a chance to display their bottled imagination, meticulously stitching narratives into quilts that read like Jane Austen short stories. A complex 1803 quilt has a central medallion of George III reviewing the troops, surrounded by 40 embroidered cartouches of contemporary life with fashionable women and men engaging in various activities. Less delicate but more vivid is an appliquéd wool quilt made in 1820 by Ann West. Lively biblical and secular scenes surround the garden of Eden, notable for Adam’s outsized fig-leaf. While each scene keeps to its own individual patch, rather like film frames, an animal occasionally wanders from one to another.

The interspersed modern works are generally rather bleak. Those devoid of practical use as bedcovers are interpretative ciphers; but Tracey Emin’s gay 2002 iron four-poster, To Meet My Past, its head-cloth jubilantly appliquéd with the phrase Weird Sex, successfully connects old and new.
Until 4 July. Information: 020 7942 2000; www.vam.ac.uk/quilts

Quilts: 1700-2010
V&A
SW7

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