Stitching Remembrance: The War Widows' Quilt

Moving online talk from the British Academy looking at a project to study the experiences of war widows which resulted in the making of a quilt.

This event took the form of a discussion between various people involved in the project chaired by Sue Pritchard from Royal Museums Greenwich who were the first to show the quilt at the Queen’s House. I live nearby and am so sorry I missed that back in 2019.

Nadine Muller from Liverpool John Moores University had initiated the project via an exercise to record the experiences of war widows in oral history interviews as she had found when she came to research the subject that very little had been written about them. During her interviews she realised that some of the women found it difficult to talk and she wondered if some sort of workshop might help them.

Lois Blackburn, an artist and co-founder of Arthur-Martha which had worked on similar projects, met Nadine in the village they both lived in and suggested workshops around handcraft and ultimately creating a quilt. She talked about how the action of sewing helped the women to talk and to raise awareness of the issues.

Mary Moreland a war widow and former chair of the War Widows’ Association talked about the support the association gave the project and their work but also about creating a piece for the quilt.

I now so want to see this work and I am fascinated by the social role of quilting over the years. I liked the variety of work in it but particularly liked the pieces made from breast pockets which many of the women filled with personal items and chose to leave them open or closed.

Project website:http://www.warwidowsstories.org.uk/

 

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