Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

My step-grandmother would have loved this show: Unbound At Two Temple Place reviewed

The exhibition celebrates seven women, each with her particular eye for the needle

My step-grandmother Connie was an inspired needlewoman. For ten years, as a volunteer for the charity Fine Cell Work, she taught embroidery to inmates at HM Prison Wandsworth. She once told me that she was tired of being a ‘committee woman’: ‘I wanted to be down in the arena with the sawdust.’ She believed in rehabilitation, not punishment. She never asked what her pupils had done; she didn’t want to know. All that mattered was finding calm and purpose in the next stitch. Picture her, silver-haired, elegant, teaching her chaps to embroider pheasants, artichokes and, her favourite, pineapples on to cushions. She was a member of the Royal School of Needlework at Hampton Court and one of the embroideresses who remade the Royal Opera House curtain. Her most fruitful stitching time was through the two weeks of Wimbledon, pausing only when her beloved Rafa Nadal was preparing to serve.

Connie, who died peacefully in her sleep last week, would have loved this exhibition. Unbound: Visionary Women Collecting Textiles celebrates seven women, each with her particular eye for a needle. The show, at Two Temple Place, is something of a trunk rummage. Don’t come for chronology or neat themes. I started to feel like Sophie Thompson’s Miss Bates, wandering from case to case murmuring: ‘Lovely, lovely.’ A ‘Black Sea Towel’ (early 20th century) hemmed with a banner of houses, trees and abstract figures — lovely. A red and black ‘Man’s Glove from Montenegro’ (date unknown) pricked with tiny shell beads and fringed with miniature tassels — lovely. A Bulgarian ‘Woman’s Gauntlets found in Macedonia’ (c.1904) and embellished with sequins, gold braid and metal thread — lovely. Extraordinary to think how many of these textiles must have been made in fading light or by flickering candle and oil. How did the Greek women who made the little lace pieces here — barely big enough for coasters for a shot of ouzo — protect their sight?

Edith Durham (1863–1944), who collected hundreds of treasures on her trips to the Balkans, said of one Albanian cloth: ‘Such handsome headdresses are no longer made.’

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