Subversive sewing book gets straight to the point

SS leader Heinrich Himmler’s struggle with the French Resistance for ownership of the medieval Bayeux Tapestry, and elderly men in Edinburgh compiling a collage on sectarianism, are just two of the stories in a debut book about subversive needlework by a Scottish textile artist attracting interest worldwide.
Clare Hunter, author of Threads Of Life, billed as a history of the world through the eye of the needle.Clare Hunter, author of Threads Of Life, billed as a history of the world through the eye of the needle.
Clare Hunter, author of Threads Of Life, billed as a history of the world through the eye of the needle.

Clare Hunter’s Threads Of Life, billed as a “history of the world through the eye of the needle”, reveals how the “voiceless” – including political prisoners in Chile, women in the Japanese Changi Prison in Singapore during the Second World War and Mary Queen of Scots –used symbols in their sewing to send out messages.

Hunter’s manuscript was snapped up by major UK publishing house Sceptre at Hodder & Stoughton. It was then chosen for BBC Radio 4’s Book Of The Week earlier this month. She has since featured in blogs worldwide.

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It was while on a visit to see the Bayeux Tapestry in France that Hunter, who graduated from the MLitt Writing Practice and Study course at the University of Dundee in 2014, said she was “seized with fury at the injustice” that the people, mostly women, who embroidered the tapestry now on Unesco’s Memory of the World Register, had been largely unacknowledged.

She said: “All those hours of labour, all that deployment of a practised skill, women’s inventiveness and imagination, dismissed as if it did not matter.”

Hunter, who has worked in a variety of community arts projects, including helping women make banners during the 1984 miners’ strike, said: “I was determined to write a book about people using the language of sewing to make their voices heard.”

Her research uncovered a host of hidden messages “hiding in plain sight”.

“Sewing is inclusive, you don’t need expensive tools,” she said. “No wonder it’s an arts medium for the dispossessed.”

Edinburgh-born John Cumming, director of live music and events producer Serious, was struck by the “survival instinct” embodied in a quilt panel his mother stitched in Changi.

Describing identifying her work – an angel and her maiden name signature Marion Williams – on a Changi quilt in the British Red Cross headquarters in London, he said: “I felt pretty emotional, seeing the evidence of someone who’d spent three-and-a-half years in that prison.

“There were multiple statements on that quilt, each stitched by someone as a statement of their own individuality.”