Eleanor Hadfield, Yarwood Grant Winner 2024

By Eleanor Hadfield

Plied wool knitted up: interdisciplinary engagements with dress and textile history, material culture, deep mapping and place.

Eleanor Hadfield, MA Historical Costume, Arts University Bournemouth has recently been awarded the Yarwood Grant for 2024.

Covering the second and third units of my MA in Historical Costume at Arts University Bournemouth, this final project is a layered and interdisciplinary exploration firstly of working-class dress in coastal North Yorkshire ca.1840-1900, and secondly of material culture related to domestic textile provision and the life cycle of clothing. Both themes are contextualised against conceptual considerations of place and the anthropological theoretical framework of deep mapping. The work has been divided between practical explorations, using both historical practice and creative responses, and a written research paper.

Place has been discussed widely by scholars across disciplines as varied as geography, anthropology, art, and performance, but despite a common thread of the very ‘humanness’ of place, there is much less about humans and their material lives in place. I hope to place value on the tactile, everyday lived experience of our ancestors. As well as objects like the Staithes bonnet and fisherman’s ganseys which have a much clearer, more obvious relationship to place and heritage, my written paper posits the small, daily acts of making and mending undertaken by the women (and men) of history, as meaningful acts both of place-marking and place-making. I believe these acts of necessity, love, or desperation, whether completed carefully or in haste, by a wife, sister, mother, or daughter, are all important; each tells a bigger story and ought not be overlooked.

Theoretical research continues to be underpinned by practical explorations which will culminate in making two outfits and samples of patchworking and mending. Furthermore, practical experiments with the anthropological theoretical framework ‘deep mapping’ will include digitally printed fabric for use in two of my makes – a Staithes bonnet and a petticoat.