Making the Australian Quilt: stitches in time at the NGV

I had never thought of quilts as a serious artform until I walked into a fascinating exhibition at the NGV.

Some of the items at Making the Australian Quilt 1800-1950, at the National Gallery of Victoria.

When we have spent years looking at pictures, listening to music or reading literature, we can forget it took time to acquire a certain level of discernment and discrimination. To appreciate any kind of art — to discover whatever perennial human interest it may have — we need to understand its material form and conventions. It can help to have a guide or teacher, but to some extent, and especially with experience, we can infer these from the work itself. Art will teach us if we have the patience to learn.

Many readers, unless they have ventured deep into the territory of folk arts and crafts, may never have looked at quilts in a serious way. I certainly had not until I walked into what turned out to be a fascinating exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. Many of the other visitors seemed to know a lot about needlework, women of a certain age who looked as though they ran quilting workshops in regional towns, but for the rest of us the first impression will probably be one of complete unfamiliarity.

The first piece on the left as you enter is a luxuriant tangle of botanical forms and patterns. You need to stop and look for a few moments, like letting your eyes adjust to low light levels, to realise what you are really looking at: a series of hexagons cut from pieces of elaborate printed fabric, with trees and flowers and palms flowing and melting into each other. It is not an elaborately surreal image of nature gone feral but a kind of assemblage of found images that produces an extravagant decorative effect with no claims to coherence.

Sewing, knitting and embroidery remain overwhelmingly women’s work, and in the past so was the still more fundamental craft of weaving. It was not just the task of servants: aristocratic women, as we see in Homer, wove with their companions. Penelope puts off the demands of the suitors with the pretext that she must weave a shroud for her father-in-law, each night unpicking the day’s work until finally caught in the act. More generally, whenever a woman is mentioned admiringly in Homer, it is not only for beauty but equally for her skill, which primarily means her skill at the loom.

Women in the West have not had to weave their own cloth for hundreds of years, and the Industrial Revolution, from the late 18th century, gradually replaced almost all hand-weaving with mechanical mass-production. In this context women have continued to work with textiles, but in modes that range from the semi-utilitarian, such as knitting jumpers, to forms that seem at first sight non-utilitarian, such as embroidery or crochet.

The persistence of these practices, like men’s handyman and do-it-yourself activities, can be explained partly as a relaxing pastime, but there are in both cases deeper cultural motivations relating to the different roles of the two sexes.

Women may no longer have to weave shrouds, but they are still disproportionately concerned with the care of the ill and dying, and almost entirely responsible for childbirth and the nurture of infants.

Most textile work is associated with these activities, from booties and baby rugs to jumpers for toddlers, and more ambitious or refined works such as embroidery were often intended for wedding trousseaux.

Quilts, sometimes intended for children but often made for the marriage bed either by an older female relative or the future bride, are a conspicuous illustration of the principle.

The difference between quilts and other forms of knitting and needlework is that while the latter involves making something entirely new from cotton or wool, the former are composed by recycling pieces of commercially produced fabric.

They are thus an example of second-degree making, an illustration of what Levi-Strauss called, in describing the characteristic thinking of tribal cultures, bricolage.

Bricolage — actually a word that in everyday French has connotations of the handyman in his shed — implies a kind of improvisation, making something with the materials and tools at hand. In the anthropological context it refers to the way tribal or prehistoric societies constantly rearrange elements of their culture, without changing in the linear or progressive fashion of historical societies.

In the present context, though, bricolage implies the way mechanically and mass-produced materials are reconfigured and given new meaning as part of an elaborate process of hand work.

Just how elaborate is clear from one particular case where we are told that the Tolman quilt (c. 1850) is composed of 6063 hexagons, each of which has 120 stitches, so that the whole work comprises about 750,000 stitches. Statistics like this speak of many hours of leisure time, or possibly domestic seclusion, and offer a vivid if ambiguous glimpse into the lives of the women who made these works.

On the whole, and contrary to what we might imagine, the earliest quilts in the new colony of NSW were not made from necessity but rather from the kind of cultural considerations discussed above: these were activities traditional for women of the middle and upper classes. Consequently the early quilts — and of course it is the best that have survived — are anything but rustic. They are often highly refined, testimony to countless hours of careful work.

Among the upper-class ladies who made quilts was Mary FitzRoy, wife of the governor of NSW; she died in a freak accident in 1847 when the horses pulling her carriage bolted and the carriage overturned in the grounds of Government House.

Her unfinished quilt, together with pieces made up but not yet stitched together, and the bag in which she kept the work in progress, are displayed in a glass case.

Not all the women who made these quilts were wealthy or, like the FitzRoys, aristocratic. One large quilt was produced by convict women transported to Australia, but assisted by a charity, the Convict Ship Committee, set up by the Quaker prison reformer Elizabeth Fry. They travelled to Australia accompanied by Kezia Hayter, who acted as a kind of ­matron, and who seems to have co-ordinated and designed the quilt. It was sent back to England with an inscription thanking the women’s benefactors.

Other quilts were made by free girls from modest backgrounds in preparation for their own weddings. A couple were made by girls who worked in drapers’ or dressmakers’ shops and had access to offcuts of good fabrics, and one by a young woman who worked in a cigar shop. Cigars were commonly sold bundled in gold silk ribbons, and she was not alone in stitching these ribbons together painstakingly to make, in her case, a kind of tablecloth.

From a distance, this piece looks strikingly oriental, and it is curious how many of these quilts, when they have a central pattern design, resemble mandalas. The immediate stylistic influence is more likely to be oriental rug design, but because quilts are composites of geometric forms and often arranged symmetrically, the pattern more often ends up recalling the mandala. The association is thus formally speaking probably fortuitous, and yet the coincidence is telling, because these pieces of work were themselves the objects of countless hours of meditative activity. There were other designs too, not all of which were centralised, including fields of a pattern called tumbling squares, which goes back to ancient mosaics.

And although most of the quilts are by women, two are by men. One is an embroidered army blanket from World War I, the other, more properly a quilt, was sewn, in tumbling square pattern, by a sailor in 1846. Men too could find themselves in a state of leisure and yet confinement on a ship at sea.

As to how they were made, the individual sections, whether diamond-shaped lozenges, hexagons or squares, were formed over paper templates which could be bought in kits. Often these were left inside the sections even when they were sewn together, and this, as well as knowledge of when certain fabrics were produced or imported, can help date particular quilts by setting a terminus post quem.

The back of one quilt is thus displayed in a glass case and we find that the patterns were cut — in an age when paper was never wasted if it could be put to another use — from a wide variety of sources. There are pages reporting parliamentary debate, on one of which we read “the bill now before the House rectifies the blunders …” We shall never know which ones are meant, but then as now there were undoubtedly plenty to choose from. Elsewhere a child has copied words in a spelling book: here “humanity” and there “diligence”.

There are words and patterns on the fronts of many of the quilts too. In 1887, Queen Victoria, who came to the throne in 1837, celebrated her golden jubilee, and many contemporary quilts make reference to her historic reign. At the same time, patriotism had a double face in an Australia that was approaching Federation, and local and national allusions and symbols abound.

The war brought a new category of quilts, less aesthetically refined but touching in a different way: typically commemorative quilts or in effect assertions of the solidarity of a small community, such as one which has the names of all the citizens of a small town, classified under the offices and institutions in which they worked. In these cases the interesting question is why a form associated with the feminine world and domestic space should be used to make a broader social statement.

It is less surprising to find a number of quilts from modest social origins embroidered with proverbs — the folk wisdom, for centuries, of people who were barely literate — and fairytales. Most of the latter would still be familiar to any child, once again proving the durability of storytelling.

The exhibition ends with a peculiar category of bed covering that may have arisen during the hardships of the Depression.

A “wagga” is made by stitching a couple of blankets together with recycled hessian sacking as a stuffing, or by stitching pieces of wool, for example leftover suiting samples, on to a blanket, either to patch it or to give it an extra layer.

The result is seldom glamorous, but the exhibition comes full circle, in a sense, with a patchwork dressing gown made by a poor Italian immigrant girl.

She couldn’t afford a glamorous new one like her girlfriends, so she made her own out of offcuts of dress fabrics. She was so pleased with the result, and it remained so important to her, that she kept it with her to the end of her long life, a testimony to the deep satisfaction that we find in making something beautiful and personally meaningful.

Making the Australian Quilt 1800-1950

National Gallery of Victoria, until November 6