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

Expected publication 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.