Join us for public lectures & podcasts through the recordings linked below.
Quilt history is for everyone & we hope to celebrate the diverse communities throughout time
who have kept and continue to keep the tradition alive.
Reframing the British Quilt: Living Labour and Art Historical Memory
Working across disciplines and reflecting on the incorporation of practice-based methods, art historian Jess Bailey and historian Deb McGuire situate histories and historiographies of the quilt within the British Isles. Focusing on case studies from communities in the North Pennines and the hills of Mid Wales between 1850–1920 and drawing from extant textiles held at the Bowes Museum, Tullie House and the Quilt Collection, York as well as living history museums such as Beamish and Museum Wales, St Fagans, the lecture explores the ways in which material culture and practice-based methodologies can reanimate marginalised histories of creativity, bringing into focus the ways that we can frame textile art practices far from elite centres.
A Paul Mellon Centre for British Art Research Seminar, Yale University, March 2025.
Quilt Time
The beautiful focus of this film is a quilt made in c.1890 in Swaledale and its journey through the generations of a family and on to the Quilters’ Guild collection in the early twenty-first century. It conveys how textiles hold powerful emotions for their makers and the relatives who have inherited them, and communicates the pleasures of hand quilting in the past and today. It also shows how inherited objects offer insights into our history, reflecting on the way inherited quilts provide insights into changing regional patterns of women’s work and lives. With Deborah McGuire and Joanne Begiato.
A film made for the Inheriting the Family research network, 2022, by Lily Ford.
Podcast: Haptic & Hue
‘Wholecloth from the Hills’
Textiles can tell us different stories – not just those of the rich and powerful – they have the power to take us beyond that and tell us tales of working people, families living difficult lives in tough times, those whom history and the written records tend to overlook. This episode is about whole cloth quilting. It explores how this technique and process eventually settled in one area of England and became an emblem of pride and local identity for people who had hardscrabble lives.
North Country whole cloth quilts are very different from patchwork quilts. Their showmanship lies in the swirling design of the quilting stitches on a completely plain background. Quilting is a process that goes back centuries, used by rich and poor alike to keep warm, as a rudimentary armour in battle, and to dress babies. Find out how this technique became identified with an area of England that stretches from North Yorkshire up onto the Scottish Borders and developed an elaborate artistry all of its own – one that even today is little known and appreciated.