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Fancy Work
Unpicking Past Lives
Brief Description
What can a scrap of embroidery tell us about how to live? How can the past help us imagine unconstrained lives when not all traces remain? To explore these questions, Alice Hattrick turns to the embroidery designer May Morris and her circle: from her father William...
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Fancy Work
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Blending biography, memoir and art criticism, Fancy Work: Unpicking Past Lives - the latest work from the author of Ill Feelings - explores the ever-shifting tensions between family, labour and gender through the history of embroidery, or 'fancy work'.
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Description
What can a scrap of embroidery tell us about how to live? How can the past help us imagine unconstrained lives when not all traces remain?
To explore these questions, Alice Hattrick turns to the embroidery designer May Morris and her circle: from her father William Morris to her mother Jane, an artist's model and embroiderer herself, and M.F., May's gender non-conforming partner of twenty years. Through this queer encounter with the Arts and Crafts movement, Hattrick shifts attention away from celebrated designers and towards intimacy, labour and domestic life. Looking to Mayβalongside others who have found in textiles a means of resistanceβHattrick traces connections between these histories and their own queer identity, family ties and precarious working conditions within an ableist society.
Expansive in thought, form and time, Fancy Work stitches together archival fragments, domestic spaces and contemporary sites of struggle, insisting on the political force of often overlooked acts of defiance.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781804272374
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 18 June 2026
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Width: 125.0mm
Height: 197.0mm
Weight: 0g
Pages: 320
About the Author
Alice Hattrick is a writer and lecturer based in London. Ill Feelings, their non-fiction book on chronic illness, intimacy and mother-daughter relationships, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2021. Alice's criticism has been published in Art Review, frieze, The White Review and TANK, among other publications. They are the co-producer of Access Docs for Artists, made in collaboration with Leah Clements and the late Lizzy Rose, and teach at University of the Arts, London.
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Ill Feelings
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