Fancy Work: Unpicking Past Lives

by Alice Hattrick

Blending biography, memoir and art criticism, Fancy Unpicking Past Lives explores the ever-shifting tensions between family, labour and gender through the history of embroidery, or 'fancy work'. At the heart of the book is Alice Hattrick's encounter with the embroidery designer May Morris and her from her father William Morris to her mother Jane, an artists' model and embroiderer herself, and M.F., May's gender non-conforming partner for twenty years. Searching for guidance, Hattrick looks to May's life – alongside others who have found, in textiles, a means of resistance – to understand better their own queer identity, family ties and fractious working conditions in an ableist society. In the ephemeral nature of textiles, Hattrick finds a mirror to archival research. How can the past help us to imagine alternative domestic circumstances and create unconstrained lives of our own, especially when not all traces remain? Expansive in thought, form and time, Fancy Work is a radical and thrilling work that reminds us that we can think differently, inviting us to place the needle in our own hands and stitch ourselves a loop in the chain.

Genres: Nonfiction

308 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 18, 2026

About the author

Alice Hattrick is a writer based in London. Their recent work has been included in HEALTH: Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz (Whitechapel/MIT, 2020) and Mine Searching Yours (Forma, 2020). Their essays, interviews and criticism have been published by The White Review, Frieze, Art Review and Rhizome among other publications, and included in events at institutions such as ICA London (‘On Cripping’), Raven Row (‘Sick Time is Resist Time’), the Barbican (New Suns Festival) and the Goldsmiths Centre of Feminist Research. Alice is also the co-producer of Access Docs for Artists, a resource for disabled and/or chronically ill artists, curators and writers, made in collaboration with artists Leah Clements and Lizzy Rose, for which they were named on The Innovator’s List for 2020 (Artnet Intelligence Report). Alice studied at the Royal College of Art and the Courtauld Institute of Art, and teaches criticism at the London College of Fashion.

Reviews

[Anna carnegie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book Fancy Work by alice hattrick has been my companion the past few weeks. Such a gentle companion, like a wise old cat nudging me to move my hands or imagine more after reading.
Fancy work weaves through the embroidery designer May Morris’ world and life alongside the mysterious yet oh so bold MF. Falling into embroidery techniques to dyes and landscapes and relationships spanning makers both quiet and loud (gee’s bend to protest banners) - Hattrick for me, managed to tell a story of the necessity that is making. The quiet care patience and resistance, especially alongside illness, queerness or unconventional lives, that making creates is so profound yet entirely right for a world that values fast production and consumption over the slow and meaningful.
I feel i could go off track writing about reading this - as I did when reading, dive into holes of image searches and other incredible lives new to my attention! I could quote Hattrick’s writing endlessly, as i underlined so much!
Most of all - i highly recommend this, especially if you value the quiet lives whose work sings loudly when given a chance.

Go make a thing!!

[Ygraine]

v beautiful and useful elaboration on some ideas that i found interesting in many hands make a quilt, and even more material & ground entirely new to me. also feels like another conversation with a friend book, a little more like still life with oysters and lemon in that its pace is often deliciously slowed by the desire to stop and find pictures and get distracted by details.