Emma Shercliff

My research investigates the nature of embodied knowledge acquired and practised through the rhythms and patterns of hand-stitching processes performed as recreational craft, artistic expression and social life. Making hand-stitched works, and especially the relationship between practical skills, the body and its proximity to tools and materials, is the focus of my study. I ask in what ways might this skilled activity articulate dimensions of subjective experience? In turn, this leads me to question ways in which the relationship between an individual and a group might be articulated through their crafting skills.

A combination of ethnographic and creative research methods including interviews, observation, video recordings of a patchwork quilting group, participation in practical stitching sessions with a village embroidery group, undertaking workshops with students, and my own reflective stitching practice has enabled me to draw from a variety of experiences in order to gain insight into the particular characteristics of this meticulous hand-eye-mind coordination. 

I suggest that hand-stitching surpasses its technical or artistic attributes when considered as a material practice that offers particular types of metaphor for other processes of joining, collaboration, integrity, or even separation and isolation, and which needs to be understood as a mode of interaction if it is not merely trivialised as quaint, as domestic labour or archived as ethnographic curiosity or as art object.

Supervisors: Dr Prue Bramwell-Davis and Freddie Robins