Research aspiration
By working as community to draw on rural heritage and create living history we can reach new understandings about our relationship with rural place and in this way, help progress a culture of care towards it
Here mobile and embodying stitching may be a ‘…means by which making remakes, repairs and reimagines our geographies’ (Price & Hawkins, 2018:239)
Fifteen people come along to the first session and consent to take part in the research. This is exactly the number I have put on my ethics form, so this feels serendipitous! My husband sometimes wisely says ‘be careful what you wish for’, on this occasion it has worked!
The group will be working to co-research the places where Ella Mary Leather collected folklore and folksong. She originally worked with her community to collect records. We will be co-creating a stitched atlas which will be exhibited next year in Leominster Museum. This will document our explorations of the places we choose to focus on.
There is a lot of material in Mrs Leather’s book, so somewhat daunting for participants to decide a place. Hence, I plan to break it down and focus on specific subjects from the book and archives over the following weeks. I reassure the participants that there is not a rush to decide what place to choose to explore. I am asking them to visit their chosen place a minimum of four times over the year, once for each season. Autumn does not finish officially until 21st December so there is plenty of time to decide! I would like them to choose a place or story or song that particularly captures their imagination.
We will be using hand stitch in the main as a method to explore and create the subject, but I tell them that I am also considering walking in place as a way of stitching with the body, where the earthy ground is the fabric instead, and their body is the needle. I have already given examples of other artists who walk trailing threads or see their body as a needle.
To prepare for this project I have recreated the dress Ella Mary Leather is wearing in a posthumous portrait and am planning to stitch all the names of her collaborators who collected folksongs or tunes for her or performed for her. I have already asked quite a few people to ‘donate’ their handwriting to rewrite these old names and have stitched them onto naturally dyed silk. I will be stitching these onto the lining of the dress, patched on to resemble the piecing together of scraps of notes as seen in her scrapbook in Ralph Vaughan Williams Memorial Library at Cecil Sharp House in Camden.
In the session I show a PowerPoint I have prepared with photographs showing my exploration of places of Mrs Leather’s life in Weobley, her book and that of folklorists who preceded her in Shropshire namely Georgina Frederica Jackson and Charlotte Sophia Burne. Ella had corresponded with Charlotte. There are about 25 years between each of the three women’s birth years. Burne went on to become the first female President of the Folklore Society, and probably of any society in Britain.
I love the map in Georgina’s Shropshire word book which shows her ‘dialecting tours’ – she divided Shropshire into areas of 18 distinct dialects and then wetn to stay in those places and interview local folk to determine words in local usage, their meaning and pronunciation. In doing so she was also told for example names of flowers by schoolchildren, names of crafting tools, and learnt about stories and customs. She became too poorly to publish the folklore herself, so her younger friend Charlotte Burne did so on her behalf.
Originally, I had planned to include Shropshire in my research but the area and amount of material across the two counties of Herefordshire and Shropshire was too huge to physically cover.
I also show photographs in the power point of my initial exploration of the location of Gospel Trees mentioned in Leather’s book and how this led to my pilot project about the River Lugg. This project tested my proposed method of stitching and heritage combined in a participatory textile project. This is documented at https://theluggembroideries.uk/
The Stitched Atlas project is one case study in my research about rural place, so finally I talk about myths, legends, folklore, my research aspirations, and I outline the records from specific places that I have gleaned from the archives and from Leather’s book. I have brought along two huge spreadsheets showing these places and linked folklore and songs, a file of songs linked to named villages or places and one of songs just linked to Herefordshire, and a cardex of individual places with the specific folklore / song attached to them. The session is just an introduction and a reckoning of the amount of possible material to explore and shows that Mrs Leather collected a huge amount in her relatively short life.
The Stitched Atlas 