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The Word for Quilting was Work
27 February 2025, 5:30 pm–7:30 pm
For this Research Seminar, we welcome Dr Jess Bailey (University of Edinburgh) for a talk on 'The Word for Quilting was Work'.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Queenie Lee – History of Art
Location
-
IAS Common Ground (G11)South WingLondonWC1E 6BTUnited Kingdom
In this lecture, Bailey will situate histories of European quilting and gender across a long durée considering the stakes of how art historians might resist trends in the gendering of a textile medium. At the center of the lecture are Europe’s oldest surviving quilts, figurative works of soft, low relief sculpture made for elite marriages in 14th century Sicily. These quilts are replete with military scenes taken from popular romances. Drawing on this medieval research, Bailey will suggest that Europe's premodern quilts might offer both provocative histories of their own and provocations for how we write feminist art histories of quilting, ultimately aiming to dismantle the primacy of a gender-binary.
Image: The Tristan and Isolde quilt, linen, circa 1890s, Sicily, Victoria and Albert Museum
About the Speaker
Dr Jess Bailey
Lecturer for Premodern Art at University of Edinburgh
Dr Jess Bailey (she/her) is Lecturer for Premodern Art in the History of Art Department, University of Edinburgh. Her published research addresses the representation of disability and gendered violence in a European context. Previously, Bailey was an Associate Lecturer for Medieval art in the History of Art Department at UCL. She is the author of Many Hands Make a Quilt: Short Histories of Radical Quilting (2nd edition 2024). She co-founded Within the Frame with quilter and historian Deb McQuire, a practice-based heritage research project for the preservation of hand quilting in a frame and has run public programing on gender and textiles at the Paul Mellon Centre with Gabe Beckhurst. Bailey is also a third-generation quilter and created the Grief Quilt for Palestine at the Slade with UCL students in 2024.
More about Dr Jess Bailey