There’s been some great coverage of the missing quilts saga with the BBC both online and on BBC Radio Gloucester.
This is a fascinating talk by author of Connecting Threads, Lynn Setterington, given online on behalf of the International Quilt Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Home to the world’s largest publicly held collection of quilts spanning five centuries and more than 55 countries to provide a scope of quilt making traditions past and present. It’s about 45 mins and a great insight into her work. You can read more detail in the book, available here.
Lynn will be exhibiting her work at the Fashion and Textile Museum, London as part of the show Textiles: The Art of Mankind, curated by Mary Schoeser, who wrote the foreword to Lynn’s book. We’re assuming that ‘mankind’ includes the rest of us too 😉.
In 1996 LynnSetterington was in a joint exhibition with Jane Poulton in Cirencester. Four of Lynn’s works disappeared from the venue and have not been seen since. Nearly 30 years later, Lynn is publishing a book looking back on her career, including sketches of some of the missing works.
The exhibition was called Home Alone at what was then Brewery Arts, Cirencester – now the well-known New Brewery Arts craft venue – 16 September to 2 November 1996.
The four pieces that disappeared were large wall hanging quilts created using the painstaking kantha stitching technique, containing hours of work. Each quilt depicted everyday objects that might normally be overlooked or taken for granted, such as cooking utensils, gardening tools and even a TV remote control. All that is left of some are the rough sketches before they were made. Do you have photographs of the exhibition? There’s an amnesty on returning the quilts – you can return them to New Brewery Arts anonymously and no questions will be asked.
Lynn’s next exhibition will be at the Fashion and Textile Museum, London as part of Textiles: The Art of Mankind, 28 March 2025 – 7 September 2025. It would be a great result to get them back to her for this show.
‘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.
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.’
‘Setterington explores the notions of craft,form and process as social glue.’ Professor Andrew Kötting, UCA, Canterbury
The author 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 focuses on popular culture, folk, and textile history. She has worked on large-scale projects with underserved communities and museums in the UK, India, Bangladesh, Brazil, and the US. Her quilts and embroideries are part of various 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.
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.
Connecting Threads: Tactile social history, by Lynn Setterington, with a foreword by Mary Schoeser. Connecting Threads was launched at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester on 23 January 2025.
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