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Connecting Threads
‘Lynn Setterington is an extremely important artist working
on the edges of politics and ethnography.’
Jane Webb, Warwick University
Connecting Threads: Tactile social history brings together twelve textile projects completed between 1981 and 2024. Each one acts as a social history document, providing tactile evidence of often untold stories of people on the margins, unexamined histories and overlooked places, all through stitch. The resulting work is both personal and political. It ranges from tiny colourful hand embroidered fragments recording everyday life in South London and Yorkshire, to monumental, site-specific banners made with construction workers in the north of England.
As a collection it describes the author’s life in stitch and details how an artist-embroiderer works and thinks creatively, how projects are managed and take shape and some of the hurdles encountered in socially engaged practice. The projects described in this book encompass themes of identity and belonging, health and wellbeing, sustainability, community cohesion and social inequality, offering sensory testaments of life today.
‘Setterington explores the notions of craft, form and process as social glue.’
Professor Andrew Kötting, UCA, Canterbury
Lynn Setterington is a major British textile artist known for her hand-stitched quilts and embroideries. Her research is situated at the intersection of craft and community, social engagement, design and activism, creating tactile social history documents with groups and communities to interrogate social injustices and celebrate the overlooked and every day. These sensory cloths provide soft, alternative flexible forms of commemoration, in contrast to the fixed, hard memorials, ubiquitous in many parks, city centres and stadiums.
Setterington’s research draws on popular culture, folk and textile history and she has undertaken many large-scale commissions and partnerships with underserved communities and museums in the UK, India, Bangladesh, Brazil and US. Her solo and shared quilts and embroideries are in private and public collections including the V&A, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Gallery Oldham, Touchstones, Rochdale, Shipley Art Gallery, the Quilters Guild, the Terrance Higgins Trust, Denver Museum of Art and the International Quilt Museum in the US.
In a career that has garnered international recognition, Setterington remains modest, committed to the next collaboration, the sharing of textile languages, the rituals of ordinary life. Hand stitch remains at the heart of all this. As she notes: ‘Embroidery today is celebrated, practised and appreciated by people from all different backgrounds and walks of life, and its value as a connecting thread and vital accessible global communication tool is finally being recognised.’
The book will be launched at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester on 23 January 2025. It’s a free event but do book a place through the link.
Setterington is taking part in a major exhibition at the Fashion and Textiles Museum, London, Textiles: The Art of Mankind, curated by Mary Schoeser, 28 March – 7 Sept 2025, celebrating the ancient and deep entanglement between textiles, people and our world.
Setterington was born in Yorkshire and studied textiles at Goldsmiths College. Her PhD with at the University for the Creative Arts utilised her longstanding experience to examine the tensions and hidden values in shared embroidery practice. She has worked at MMU for over thirty years and is a trustee for the creative charity, Venture Arts, a Fellow of the Quilt Museum, University of Nebraska, member of the 62 Group of textile artists, Rogue Studios, Manchester and the Textile Society (UK).
Mary Schoeser is an internationally respected textile and wallpaper historian who has published and curated widely. She has collaborated with many museums over her 40 year career, including the Fashion Textile Museum, London; the V&A – where she is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow – and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
