Fancy Work by Alice Hattrick

Fancy Work by Alice Hattrick

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, including her father William Morris; her mother Jane, an artist’s model and embroiderer herself; and MF, May’s gender non-conforming partner of twenty years. Through this queer encounter with the Arts and Crafts movement, Hattrick shifts attention from dominant narratives of design 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 ongoing sites of struggle, insisting on the political force of often overlooked acts of defiance.

‘Ill Feelings is a deeply personal and deeply political reckoning with the nature of illness, inheritance, time, silence, bodies and invisibilityAlice Hattrick offers both a radical redefinition of the dominant narratives surrounding health and pain, and the knowledge we need in order to name, understand and resist them. Hattrick has found a voice and form which open up new and exciting possibilities for writing the self and making sense of the collective past: I read this remarkable book with outrage, fascination and immense admiration.’
— Francesca Wade, author of Square Haunting (praise for Ill Feelings)

‘I love the quality of attentiveness that Alice Hattrick brings to their poised and pointillistic exploration of the mysterious aetiologies and affects of chronic fatigue. They excel in listening out for echoes and whispers, their narrative of illness wriggling into uncomfortable places that medicine dismisses or ignores. Their book makes you pause to think – and rethink – page by page.’
— Marina Benjamin, author of Insomnia (praise for Ill Feelings)

‘Hattrick’s ability to reflect life with ME in form and language is complex and brilliant. The structure of Ill Feelings appears initially as haphazard, perhaps, but the more you read, the more it clarifies: this is not a book of simple narrative, of gradual progression.’
— Connor Harrison, Review 31 (praise for Ill Feelings)

Alice Hattrick is a writer and lecturer based in London. Ill Feelings, their non-fiction book on chronic illness, intimacy and mother-daughter relationships, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2021. Alice’s criticism has been published in Art Review, frieze, The White Review and TANK, among other publications. They are the co-producer of Access Docs for Artists, made in collaboration with Leah Clements and the late Lizzy Rose, and teach at University of the Arts, London.