I enjoy creating work that does not quite fit the usual perimeters.... Like my embroidery activism project, Robe Rebellion.
Here is a short video about it on YouTube: ROBE REBELLION
Robe Rebellion was inspired by my uneasy relationship with the uniformity and exclusivity of academic dress. I gathered a team of expert sewers (talented friends), and we began transforming my PhD gown into something we could all feel proud of.
As more people make their mark on the gown (it's going out to community groups to add their own embroideries), we are building something everyone can feel a part of. A gown everyone can "don with pride". Like an Oxford don, but better.
Here is The Robe (below) having its first rebellious outing, on 23 April 2025, for Shakespeare's "birthday" celebrations in The Painted Room, Oxford:
Here is a short video about it on YouTube: ROBE REBELLION
Robe Rebellion was inspired by my uneasy relationship with the uniformity and exclusivity of academic dress. I gathered a team of expert sewers (talented friends), and we began transforming my PhD gown into something we could all feel proud of.
As more people make their mark on the gown (it's going out to community groups to add their own embroideries), we are building something everyone can feel a part of. A gown everyone can "don with pride". Like an Oxford don, but better.
Here is The Robe (below) having its first rebellious outing, on 23 April 2025, for Shakespeare's "birthday" celebrations in The Painted Room, Oxford:
The blue silk facings, when seen close up, are embroidered with flowers running top to bottom in the colours of the rainbow:
wild thyme flowers, honeysuckle, cowslip, ivy, violet, pansy.
I owe heartfelt thanks to Ro Davis for her sewing brilliance.
Ro and I share a love of Shakespeare. So all these flowers are found in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Honeysuckle goes by ‘sweet woodbine’ in the play, while ‘love-in-idleness’ is the wild pansy, Viola tricolor.
Soon I'll be sewing one of my favourite Shakespeare quotations onto one of the sleeves:
‘In a cowslip’s bell I lie’ sings Ariel in The Tempest.
But first we'll sew on the spectacular embroideries created by:
- Hannah Clift (our very own William Shakespeare, pictured)
- Claire Frampton, my colleague at the Ashmolean Museum
See the photographs below (which do not do them justice; they are quite stunning and so cleverly done.)
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