Alice Hattrick in conversation with Laura Moseley: Fancy Work

Join Alice Hattrick in conversation with Laura Moseley to discuss their book, Fancy Work: Unpicking Past Lives at Outpost, Norwich.
About this Event

What can a scrap of embroidery tell us about how to live? How can the past help us imagine unconstrained lives when not all traces remain?

To explore these questions, Alice Hattrick turns to the embroidery designer May Morris and her circle: from her father William Morris to her mother Jane, an artist’s model and embroiderer herself, and M.F., May’s gender non-conforming partner of twenty years. Through this queer encounter with the Arts and Crafts movement, Hattrick shifts attention away from celebrated designers and towards intimacy, labour and domestic life. Looking to May – alongside others who have found in textiles a means of resistance – Hattrick traces connections between these histories and their own queer identity, family ties and precarious working conditions within an ableist society. Expansive in thought, form and time, Fancy Work stitches together archival fragments, domestic spaces and contemporary sites of struggle, insisting on the political force of often overlooked acts of defiance.

Alice Hattrick is a writer and lecturer based in London. Ill Feelings, their non-fiction book on chronic illness, intimacy and mother-daughter relationships, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2021. Alice’s criticism has been published in Art Review, frieze, The White Review and TANK, among other publications. They are the co-producer of Access Docs for Artists, made in collaboration with Leah Clements and the late Lizzy Rose, and teach at University of the Arts, London.

Laura Moseley is Curator of the Women’s Art Collection at the University of Cambridge and Founder of Common Threads Press. She holds a BA in History of Art from the University of York, where she received the dissertation prize for her thesis Indigenous and Modern Textiles: Ancient America in the Work of Anni Albers and Cecilia Vicuña. She also holds an MA in History of Art from University College London, where she again received the dissertation prize for A Diary of Touch: Rhetorics of Queer Identity in Contemporary Quilting Practices.