Pippa Foulds is a textile artist based in the Yorkshire Dales. Pippa trained as a traditional hand embroidery tutor with the Royal School of Needlework and the craft of hand-stitch is important to her work. Following a foundation degree in Textile Practice at Bradford School of Art, her embroidery has further developed from the figurative into a more abstract genre.
My work looks at how our personal lives are absorbed by the textiles we wear and use. Mark and repair can tell stories about the most mundane of things – those that we often overlook. I ask people to look more closely and not be seduced by the decorative to the detraction of the hidden, the worn and the ordinary. I often work in sheer and recycled fabrics, layering pieces to express the concepts and emotions that I wish to explore.
“Don’t Forget the Plain Ones, featured in Tangled Up, is my response to research I have undertaken into large tie-on pockets worn by women in the 18th & 19th centuries. At a time when women had few if any rights over themselves or their property, these pockets gave them a place where they could ‘own’ and store their most personal possessions at a time of booming commercialisation. Pockets are worn close to the body and can be a lens through which we can view the life and the memories of their wearers. In this piece, I am exploring ideas of women’s friendship and identity, how pockets helped to nurture their network of acquaintances, facilitate their mobility and express their emotions.
The majority of pockets, throughout this period, whether for aristocrats or fishwives, were made from plain or re-purposed linens or cottons, often with no embellishment other than maybe a laundry mark. In museum archives there are collections of embroidered pockets aplenty. Overlooking the ‘plain’ ones means that we miss a rich source of contextual information about women’s lives in the past.
Using museum examples and evidence from the criminal courts about the contents of the pockets, I have endeavoured to tell the stories of some of these women and encourage the viewer not to dismiss the plain, wherever you meet it.
I have recreated with hand stitch a variety of pockets – for a laundress, an impoverished lady, a prisoner, an educated gentlewoman and a long lost anonymous found pocket. I have used wax, natural dyes, layers of sheer and found materials to portray the vulnerability and fragility of some of these concepts but also the resilience of the owners in the face of hardship, asking the viewer to ponder the secrets and emotions trapped between the threads.”
