Journalist Mishal Husain set for public talk at celebration of women’s creativity and decorative arts

A research project exploring how Victorian attitudes towards the decorative arts continue to influence the way women’s creativity is viewed today will conclude with a public event featuring award-winning journalist and author Mishal Husain.

The Art of Fiction, led by the University of Exeter, has investigated the legacy of 19th-century attitudes that textile-based art and craft, like embroidery, knitting, and crochet, were lacking in artistic value.

Among the project’s outputs is a textile collage, to which more than 100 members of the public have contributed patches and personal stories of their own creative inspirations.

At a concluding symposium to be held next week, featuring a wide range of artists and academics, Ms Husain will take to the stage to talk about the project’s shared themes with her book Broken Threads: My Family from Empire to Independence. She will also reveal how, by coincidence, she discovered that members of her own family contributed patches to the piece of art.

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Art of Fiction has been conducted by experts in Exeter’s Department of English and Creative Writing.

“Historically, women’s creativity has usually been associated with everyday domestic materials, such as textiles,” said Dr Patricia Zakreski, Associate Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture, and project lead.

“But in the later decades of the nineteenth century, there was a call to take these crafts more seriously as forms of art, particularly by women writers who saw parallels and echoes in their novels which found human interest in beauty in domestic and everyday life.

“The Art of Fiction has sought to continue the work begun by these women writers, gathering stories of creativity and their connections to textiles. Contributors from around the world answered with a diverse and inspiring range of stories of women’s creative lives and beautiful and meaningful patches.”

The striking patchwork, called Women’s Work, was made by artist Ruth Broadway, who stitched together 148 12cm square patches of fabric submitted by people with a passion for decorative arts.

An interactive digital version of the piece has now been created by the University’s Digital Humanities Lab, which will be unveiled during the symposium and will remain an online legacy of the project.

The symposium, entitled Stitching Stories, will take place on Friday 7 March at Reed Hall on the University’s Streatham campus. Among the talks and panels scheduled for the day include poet Jenny Mitchell discussing how her work draws out connections between storytelling and dressmaking; Professor Grace Lees-Maffei talking about the HMP Wandsworth Quilt, made by prisoners for a V&A collection; and artist Sue Green on how the histories of the cotton industry in Yorkshire and Somerset have informed her work.

In the evening, Ms Husain will take to the stage with Professor Zakreski to discuss her book, which tells the story of her grandparents and their experiences in India and Pakistan during the last years of the British Empire, Independence and Partition.

“Mishal’s book explores many of the themes that underpin our project and this symposium, including an important central ‘thread’ about stitching and storytelling,” said Dr Alexandra du Plessis, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow on the project. “It was during conversations with her that we discovered that her cousins had submitted patches following our public call-out, and so in a very real sense, aspects of her family history are now also woven into our artwork.”

Ms Husain had a decorated career with the BBC, covering global news stories from the Middle East to the British Royal Family, and was a presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme for 11 years. She is now preparing to launch a new global interview show for Bloomberg this year.

She said: “When I heard about this project I felt an immediate connection to the way it blends personal stories and artistic creativity. I’m delighted to be part of the event that brings the exhibition to a close.”

For more information about this event – which is free to attend – visit Eventbrite.

The creation of the digital version of Women’s Work

Thanks to the team in Digital Humanities, Women’s Work has been preserved online as a new digital artifact.

However, the task was complicated because large, highly textured objects can be challenging to photograph at high resolution. Getting the level of detail required meant joining together multiple photos of smaller sections to form a larger image.

This technique has worked well with flatter objects digitised by the team in the past, such as the Courtenay family tree from Powderham Castle, and the painted scrolls from the Famine Tales project. But here, there was so much surface texture to the patches that joining together the images seamlessly was near impossible.

To overcome this, the team used a camera on a sliding rig to take 203 photos covering the whole surface of the patchwork object, then used the photographs for a technique called photogrammetry to produce a 3D model of the surface. From there, they generated an orthomosaic projection – a top-down view – from the 3D model, which enabled them to produce a sufficiently high-resolution image that conveys the intricate detail and skill that had gone into each patchwork.