About

This project uses craftivism (for definitions of that terms see here and here) as a strategy to challenge common notions about medieval women’s lives and experiences. Specifically it challenges the image of the medieval embroidery worker as a lady in a tower: an elite individual woman who worked on textiles as a leisure activity. This project seeks to foreground medieval women's textile work instead as work, as labor, performed by lower and middle class women as a means of economic support.

The project consists of embroidered pieces that display signs of their working in the form of visible trailing threads. Their imagery is drawn from the margins of medieval manuscripts in order to make of use its frequently sexual, scatological, hybrid, and grotesque imagery to further challenge the use of the medieval past as a ground for conservative constructions of gender and sexuality. The pieces are transformed into stickers with the addition of an adhesive backing and installed as street art in urban areas where medieval women who were involved in textile production lived and worked.  The first installation is in Paris in June 2018 on the Rue Quincampoix in an area where medieval silkwomen lived and worked.