Fancy Work

Title: Fancy Work
Author: Alice Hattrick
ISBN: 9781804272374
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Published: 2026
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Number of Pages: 240
Condition Note: New from the publisher
Publisher Description:

What can a scrap of embroidery tell us about how to live? How can the past help us imagine unconstrained lives when not all traces remain?

To explore these questions, Alice Hattrick turns to the embroidery designer May Morris and her circle: from her father William Morris to her mother Jane, an artist's model and embroiderer herself, and M.F., May's gender non-conforming partner of twenty years. Through this queer encounter with the Arts and Crafts movement, Hattrick shifts attention away from celebrated designers and towards intimacy, labour and domestic life. Looking to May - alongside others who have found in textiles a means of resistance - Hattrick traces connections between these histories and their own queer identity, family ties and precarious working conditions within an ableist society. Expansive in thought, form and time, Fancy Work stitches together archival fragments, domestic spaces and contemporary sites of struggle, insisting on the political force of often overlooked acts of defiance.