https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2236-2278
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Abstract
This practice-based, interdisciplinary research focuses on the life and work of Amy Atkin, who claimed to be the first female Nottingham machine-lace designer. This study contextualizes her work within the framework of other early female British art students. Constrained by domesticity, like many other middle-class women in the early twentieth century, she had to relinquish paid work on marriage. The waste of talent resulting from this requirement inspired a practice response, based on table mats, informed by Amy Atkin’s lace designs, Catherine Bertola’s 2008 exhibition Prickings, and Judy Chicago’s iconic second-wave feminist work The Dinner Party (1979). This use of domestic textiles to critique gender politics and thus to subvert the quotidian is discussed and the theory of neo-Victorianism is used to consider works by textile artists who use the life of Victorian women as inspiration for practice that critiques feminism through the lens of the twenty-first century. This research combines social history, feminism, neo-Victorianism, and subversive stitching to consider the continuing constraints of domesticity on women’s lives both in the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Notes
1 The women she chose were: the notorious chocolate cream poisoner Christina Edmunds; the pioneering medical doctor Dr Sophia Jex-Blake; social campaigner Clementina Black; theatre manager Ellen Nye Chart; socialite Maud Messel; actress Harriet Mellon; and actress and writer Mary Robinson-Perdita.
2 My thanks to Judith Edgar, Curator of Lace, Costume and Textiles Collection at Nottingham City Museum and Galleries for allowing access to the collection and many interesting discussions. Many thanks also to Dr Joy Buttress for her help with the collection. Details of the Collection can be found at http://nottinghammuseums.org.uk/category/collections/costume-textiles/.
3 Both of these cuttings from unknown newspapers are undated and anonymous and are pasted in a scrapbook. This material has not yet been accessioned therefore the book has no accession number.
4 This is reported as advice from Dr Charles Thomson, Superintendent Medical Officer for Health in Belfast to young husbands about the sacrifices women have to make when they marry.
5 This is confirmed by his obituary in a local newspaper stating that he was the Nottingham representative for Kelley’s Directories Ltd, London, for 40 years.
6 My thanks to Dr Gail Baxter for this information about Amy Atkin’s student record.
7 This book had not been accessioned when I saw it so did not have an accession number.
8 Information about the lace manufacturers referred to on Amy Atkin’s designs comes from the gazetteer in Sheila Mason’s book on Nottingham lace.
9 I have used the spelling Levers for this type of lace as that was the more common name when Amy Atkin was working. Lever was the inventor’s name but the change of name to Leaver probably originated in France in the twentieth century. The revised name was adopted by the Lace Working Party of 1946 (Earnshaw Citation1986, 108).
10 For more information about the lace industry in and around Nottingham see Mason (Citation1994), for more information about types of machine lace and the mechanisms of lace machines see Earnshaw (Citation1986 and Citation1995).
11 The text of The Angel in the House by Coventry Patmore can be found at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4099/4099-h/4099-h.htm (Accessed on 3 November 2020).
12 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/29/covid-19-crisis-could-set-women-back-decades-experts-fear (Accessed on 27 October 2020).
13 Gretchen Mieszkowski is Professor Emeritus of Literature/Women’s Studies at University of Houston-Clear Lake (UHCL).
14 The Dinner Party was first exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Art in March - June 1979 and then at UHCL in March - June 1980.
15 The term ‘the long nineteenth century’ was popularized in the UK by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm who separated the period into three parts: The Age of Revolution 1789–1848; The Age of Capital 1848–1875; and The Age of Empire 1875–1914.
16 https://www.axisweb.org/p/catherinebertola/#info (Accessed on 6 October 2020).
17 Prickings was exhibited at: Fabrica, Brighton, in May and June 2006; The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, from September 2006 to April 2007; and Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery from February to April 2007.
18 A pricking is the pattern a lacemaker uses to make bobbin lace and traditionally consisted of a piece of vellum or parchment with the pin holes required for the pattern already pricked through it.
19 The women she chose are listed in the first endnote above.
20 I found this quote in Diana Wood Conroy’s “Shadows of the Past in Re-visioning Textiles.” In The Handbook of Textile Culture, edited by Janis Jefferies, Diana Wood Conroy and Hazel Clark. P. 139. London: Bloomsbury.
21 Katherine Townsend was discussing the use of the Lace Archive at Nottingham Trent University and the work shown in the subsequent exhibition Bummock: The Lace Archive but the principle applies to research in any textile industry archive.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Carol Quarini
Dr. Carol Quarini is an independent researcher and artist. She undertook her practice-based PhD at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham. Her postdoctoral research focuses on the history, manufacture, and design of net curtains and lace panels. Her current practice critiques domesticity and feminism using subversive stitching and lace. She has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, published in the UK, and presented her research at international conferences.[email protected]