Patchwork, Society

Back in September, I joined the Irish Patchwork Society (Eastern Branch). Tomorrow, a group of us are off to London to visit the Quilts 1700-2010 exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Tomorrow, people! I’ve been squeeing about this for seven months! Eeeeeeeee!

Ahem.

I’ve avoided reading reviews of the exhibition, because I don’t want to go in with too many preconceptions. I’m really wondering what I’m going to make of it.

The Revolutionary Horde: Why’s that, Léan?

Well, it’s a question of taste.

I love my IPS branch meetings: every time I go I get all head-swimmily blissful and spend most of the time sitting there with a huge grin on my face. Because, patchwork, right?

Each meeting features milling around chatting, tea and biscuits, a visiting shop, chairwoman’s announcements, a “show and tell” slot where members can display work they’ve recently finished, and (generally) a visiting speaker.

Mostly, these speakers are professionals in the field of quilting or related arts, who bring along either slides or physical work to show and pass around. This is where my grin graduates from the merely huge to the downright beatific.

It’s hard for me to articulate just what produces this effect. I love textile art – always have – I love it with my bones and my skin and my breath.

The more I learn about it, the more I love it. I love the colours, the textures. I love the relationship between aesthetics and function. I love how these skills are so central to women’s work and women’s history. I love the techniques and the technologies.

Obviously, I don’t love each and every example that I see. And I’ve noticed something that intrigues me: at the show and tell sessions of my IPS branch meetings, the quilts that provoke the loudest moans and sighs of longing from the audience, the longest applause, are quite often those that leave me coldest.

Perhaps it’s just a generational thing. I’d guess that the average age in the room is a couple of decades ahead of mine. Maybe these women’s established aesthetic is simply at odds with what I’ve grown up with.

I’m talking – let me be clear here – about nothing too offensive. Think bunnies and teddy bears. Think Holly Hobbie silhouettes. Think pastels. “That’s nice,” says I, if I find the piece pleasingly composed and well executed. But I don’t sigh. I don’t gasp. I don’t ovate. And many of my fellow branch members do.

I like my art to be a little bit crunchy, a little bit tangled, a little bit (oh dear) clever. Or at least humorous – there was one recent quilt with hares doing ballet, which was kind of lovely.

I resist the idea of an absolute aesthetic, a yardstick by which designs can be measured and judged. Yet clearly, what I’m talking about here is a judgement – it’s more than just a difference in preferred colours or shapes. There’s a cultural framework I’m bringing to bear on these designs, an iconography into which I’m fitting them, an “I know it when I see it” quality to the way I look at them, which … well.

OK. They’re twee.

There. I said it.

And I’m uncomfortably aware that “twee” is the kind of label that those with more privilege tend to toss around when discussing the aesthetic choices of those with less privilege.

So what I’m really eager to find out is, how will the quilts in the V&A on Wednesday speak to me? Between my personal taste and that of the curators of this exhibition, will I find more common ground, or less, than I seem to have with the IPS members? And does the answer to that question have any significance?

I can’t promise to come up with a definitive verdict, but do stay tuned for my vague ramblings if you’re so inclined!