By Vanessa Marr
This work includes a creative response to the theme of blame-healing and resistance, presented at the Threads of Connection, Sorry/Not Sorry conference at the Museum of Motherhood, 2024. It features a collection of embroidered ‘mother-love tokens’ – lace-edged handkerchiefs featuring hand-stitched representations of gifts given to me by my four daughters when they were small. I’ve titled this work Tokens of Resistance, capturing the spirit of craftivism (Greer 2014) and embroidery as an act of feminist emancipation because making each one has been an act of love, memory, and personal activism. As Roszita Parker writes in her seminal book The Subversive Stitch: ‘feminists in their embroidery showed that the personal was the political – that personal and domestic life is as much the product of the institutions and ideologies of our society as is public life’ (Parker 1984, p.205).
They include a homemade bracelet made from children’s beads and a teddy bear pin (fig. 1), a picture selected from the many I’ve saved with the same message (fig. 2), and a remembered necklace strung with pasta tubes gifted to me so many times by my daughters after playgroup (fig. 3). I also stitched an illustration of my own baby dress saved by my mother (fig. 4), and a crochet square referencing a blanket I made for my granddaughter as hope for the future (fig.5). Each object I have chosen is without monetary value, rather it is treasured for the value it holds as a token of love between child and mother. Inspired by the history of love tokens (Millmore, 2015), the cloth tokens left by mothers at the Foundling Hospital in London (1739 – 1955) and the complex history of handkerchiefs as token of memory and endearment (Mirabella, 2011), each artwork reaffirms our bond.
Fig.1: Tokens of resistance: a homemade bracelet made from children’s beads, a teddy bear pin.
Fig.2: A drawing from my daughter, then aged 6, now aged 33.
Fig. 4: A remembered necklace, strung with pasta tubes.
Fig. 4: My own baby dress, saved by my mother.
Fig. 5: A crochet square. Hope for the future, embodied in the blanket made for my granddaughter.
The creation of each stitched token has been an act of embodied healing and resistance against the blame and shame have been constant shadows in my mothering experience; on becoming a mother, being mothered myself, and more recently through the painful transition into new mothering relationships as my children have become adults. As a practice-based researcher and autoethnographer, I create these artworks as a method of making to know these experiences inwardly (Marr, 2019, 2020), whilst outwardly enticing change (Adams, Holman and Jones, 2015) and challenging the oppression of mothers.
Society’s expectations of mothers have never been so extreme, with trends towards perfectionism masking patriarchal and misogynistic constructs that hold us answerable for every element of our children’s lives, often well into adulthood. This pressure to be perfect hurts new mothers too, who struggle under the weight of unachievable goals, whilst old mothers are weighed down with regret. This is not constructive for either one.
These tokens are a reminder of my children’s love for me, an affirmation of mine for them, an apology to my own mother, and an act of resistance against dominant narratives that can lead us to forget that a mother’s love that is always there, even when blame and shame get in the way.
Bibliography:
Adams, Ellis and Holman Jones, (2015). Autoethnography: Understanding Qualitative Research. Oxford.
Greer, B. (2014). Craftivism. Arsenal Pulp Press.
Marr, V (2019), Drawing with Thread Upon a Duster: A Phenomenological Investigation of Female Domestic Experience, Vol. 14 No, 1, https://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/TRACEY/issue/view/208 (last accessed 6 December 2021).
Marr, V. et al. (2020) The Domestic Academic. In: Moriarty, J (ed). Storying the Self. Intellect Books. In Press.
Mirabella, B. (2011) Embellishing Herself with a Cloth: The Contradictory Life of The Handkerchief,” Ornamentalism: the Art of Renaissance Accessories (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Mirabella, B. (2011) Love Tokens: Engraved coins, emotions and the poor 1700-1856. PhD Thesis. University of Brighton.
Parker, R. (1984). The Subversive Stitch. Tauris & Co. Ltd.
Vanessa Marr bioVanessa Marr (RSA) is Principal Lecturer and Course Leader at the University of Brighton. She is best known for her experimental autoethnographic practice, drawing with thread onto commonplace objects to phenomenologically embody her gendered, lived experience. Marr is drawn to cloth as a medium that holds the legacy of so-called women’s work and its potential for subversion and quiet activism. She has published and exhibited internationally on themes of autoethnography, drawing, stitching, and writing as creative research practice. She regularly leads collaborative, creative and research projects, and never stops learning, making, and writing.
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