Book Review: Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle
Clare Hunter, Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, Abrams Press, $17.00, 320 pp, October 2020
With Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, Clare Hunter—a veteran community-minded textile artist, banner maker, and exhibition curator from Scotland—has sought to explore and champion the diverse potencies of needle and thread. Over the course of this book’s 16 chapters, she makes abundantly clear that the business of Sewing (I use here a capital “S” to express every stitch type, fiber, machine make and model, embroidery hoop, arthritic hand, and strained set of eyes) is neither just decorous nor just practical. It is, first and foremost, fiercely human.
Hunter has chosen one, evocative word for each chapter title: “Unknown,” “Power,” “Frailty,” “Captivity,” “Identity,” “Connection,” “Protect,” “Journey,” “Protest,” “Loss,” “Community,” “Place,” “Value,” “Art,” “Work,” and “Voice.” With each of these words, Hunter sets up an argument she must prove, a historical reality she must animate, and a foundation of emotional resonance she must build. The second chapter “Power” is, I think, a particularly successful one, with all of these goals achieved. In “Power,” Hunter explores Mary, Queen of Scots’ relationship with needlework—the ill-fated queen was a talented embroider—and the “armoury of textiles” that Mary variously made and displayed from the time her feet re-touched Scottish soil in August 1561 (after growing up in France) to her execution in February 1587. Importantly, Hunter claims that few biographers or historians of Mary have considered her embroidery and its purpose, though “It [her embroidery] was her agent. It was to become her emotional and political representative.” Hunter tugs at an overlooked but hugely important thread of Mary’s life (and that of any female monarch in the period) while providing her readers with substance and stimulus for extended study—reason to search out images of Opus Anglicanum and those few pieces of Mary’s needlework housed in the V&A Museum, Holyrood Palace, Oxburgh Hall, and elsewhere. In excavating a little-studied aspect of history through needlework and providing inspiration to the presumed reader-researcher, this chapter’s arc is emblematic of what Hunter is trying to do with the book overall.
“With each of these chapter titles, Hunter sets up an argument she must prove, a historical reality she must animate, and a foundation of emotional resonance she must build.”
Not all of Hunter’s chapters meditate on the sewn creations of just one historical figure. Often, she makes meaningful the title of the chapter by touching upon the efforts and histories of different groups, peoples, and places. Fittingly, she does just that in the twelfth chapter, “Place.” Hunter speaks of 18th-century map samplers that were sewn by schoolgirls in Europe and North America—girls who lived in an age when and where there was “a growing appetite for lists, for quantitative rather than qualitative data, for precise details of size and sale.” But she also considers the significance of Place in the “syncopated, free-spirited” quilts made by enslaved people in North America (she explores the more specific history of Harry Powers, to whom two surviving quilts are attributed).
Importantly, though, Hunter weaves the autobiographical into each chapter. All 16 chapters springboard off of the anecdotal or the immediate in Hunter’s life. In “Place,” she opens with a description of Scottish singer and story gatherer Alison McMorland’s 1994 project on the island of Mull (located in the Inner Hebrides), in which she recorded the memories of the island’s oldest residents. These recollections were imaginatively transformed first into a painting by Edinburgh-based artist Kate Downie and then into a textile by Hebridean spinner, weaver, and dyer Flora McDonald. A certain Scottishness permeates the entire book, even parts that tell stories of elsewhere, but I do not find this filter to be problematic, like the colonialist gaze of authority or superior know-how that has plagued (or defined, really) much Western scholarship on material culture for centuries. If anything, Hunter consistently re-asserts that, throughout her textile career, she has simply wanted to learn from others without pretense.
“Hunter never aggrandizes her knowing in the anecdotes that hold together Threads of Life; always, she identifies herself as a woman from a particular place who venerates textiles and fiber traditions from all places.”
A good example of this: In her chapter “Journey,” she recounts an extraordinary experience in Kaili, southwest China in 1995. In short, Hunter is paid a sudden visit by a Miao woman in the former’s dingy hotel room. The two women exchange admiring, curious stares and friendly forms of touch—hugs, little dances, and handholding. On Hunter’s bed, the Miao woman shakes loose a generous pile of textiles and garments that belong to the aesthetic and handiwork traditions of her people. Hunter selects a few items from the pile, and in return she gifts the Miao woman “a tea towel emblazoned with an entire Scottish pipe band resplendent in kilts and bearskin hats.” [112] Hunter, who began her sewing career in her late teens when she took a summer job in a local dry cleaners, never aggrandizes her knowing in the anecdotes that hold together Threads of Life; always, she identifies herself as a woman from a particular place who venerates textiles and fiber traditions from all places.
Hunter’s descriptions of tea towels, garments, sewing samplers, quilts, embroidery, and other textiles are always vivid (even loving). But for those interested in reading Threads of Life with scholarship in mind, it is worth noting that only one image appears in the book: a mid-19th-century advertisement for the viewing of Menzies Moffat’s works of intarsia patchwork (a time-consuming and sophisticated type of patchwork that Hunter likens to marquetry-in-fabric). It is possible that budgetary limitations are responsible for the 99.9% absence of images. Also, the book does not include footnotes or endnotes. Rather, Hunter includes, at the front, useful and detailed paragraphs of acknowledgement and thanks (she gives the names of those who helped her at various institutions) and, at the back, a general bibliography of sources and specific bibliographies for each chapter. The very last page of the book is a list of websites for institutions such as the V&A, London’s Foundling Museum, the Quilt Museum, and others. What Threads of Life lacks in the crowded but reliable formality of footnotes and glossy paper images, it makes up for in Hunter’s transparency. She acknowledges that it would be an impossibility to list every book she has read in her long career of learning and teaching that contained “nugget[s] of useful or illuminating information or insight.” She adds that many of these books are likely out of print or obscure.
“Hunter urges her readers to not only share in her dreams about textiles but also pursue the inspiring and often overlooked work of thinking through thread.”
The soaring and somewhat indulgent quality of Hunter’s language makes for good (but still smart!) pleasure reading. This dreaminess sets the tone for the entirety of Threads of Life. Hunter begins the first chapter, “Unknown,” with her oneiric habits: “Sometimes I dream about textiles…When I wake, it is always with a sharp pang of loss, more acute than might be felt for actual textiles. Because the textiles I touch in my dreams have never existed. There is no hope of their re-discovery.” Again, Hunter’s investigative work (e.g., the rounding-up of important dates, place names, key players, and textile terminology) is earthy, determined, and lucid. But perhaps more than any other possible description—a reference book or a beach read—Threads of Life is a rallying cry. In her consideration of the Bayeux Tapestry, Hmong story cloths, suffragette banners, burial clothes, and more, Hunter urges her readers to not only share in her dreams about textiles but also pursue the inspiring and often overlooked work of thinking through thread.
