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Quilts and Crafts

The V&A’s latest blockbuster ‘Quilts’ is proving something of an unexpected hit having racked up impressive advance sales of 8,000! It’s tapping into several over-arching trends in particular the leaning towards a homespun authenticity, crafts and a desire for something one-off and personal.

Celebrating 300 years of the practice of quilt making, work from contemporary artists like Tracey Emin and Grayson Perry are on show alongside archival material from the V&A, National Gallery of Australia, Ulster Folk and Transport Museum and Glasgow Museum. The seventy-piece showcase also features a series of special commissions from Susan Stockwell, Jo Budd and Caren Garfen. The exhibition explores the idea of quilts as a means to track memories and personal histories, picking up precious pieces here and there from our own journeys and also stitching-in our thoughts and messages – particularly well demonstrated by Emin.
The art of quilt making represents the patience and high skill associated with one-off production contrasting with the more commonplace mass of factory ready-mades. Upon entering, a four-poster bed hanging on show comprises of 6,500 individual hand-sewn pieces. Although we’ve already seen a lot of pieced-together contrasting and salvaged fabrics on the runways in past seasons, we are now we are seeing a less literal, more all-encompassing take on that personal crafts feel in general. Quilts as a means for storytelling and narrative ties in nicely with the folkish trends we’ve seen filtering through the catwalks with a host of Eastern European cultures inspiring nuances in regional crafts and techniques.