The Sleepers exhibition
Over the past few years, I’ve been diagnosed with a few chronic conditions. Before this, I was very active - regularly climbing mountains and once sailing across an ocean. As a result, I have a complicated relationship with rest. I’m trying to accept that I need more than I did, while also resenting that I need to. When The Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edward’s College reached out to me to create a quilt about the concept of rest, it seemed like the perfect fit.
The curator, Laura, was herself a quilter and felt that she couldn’t create a collection called “The Sleepers” without including a quilt. Rather than focussing on one interpretation of rest, the quilt was to collate many. Together with Laura I ran workshops at the Cambridge Women’s Resource Centre. While I’ve taught at festivals and retreats before, these workshops were different. First, we focussed on what rest meant to each of the participants. The Resource Centre supports a variety of vulnerable women, many of whom originally found rest a difficult concept to articulate. However, through supportive sessions and group brainstorming, clearer concepts and ideas arose.
All of the participants were given squares of fabric - kindly donated by Backstitch Cambridge - to capture their ideas. The mediums used varied, from traditional embroidery to appliqué to hand drawing and beyond. After three workshops, the women were given a chance to work on their pieces in their own time, until they were collected and given to me to turn into a quilt.
I was astonished by the variety and beauty in the blocks. Some of the women had never picked up a needle and produced truly exquisite pieces of embroidery, while others employed the fabric in really creative ways. The only thing that wasn’t unique between the blocks was the amount of care and emotion they expressed. It was fascinating to see how all these different women viewed rest - from ideas about safety and security to a simple cup of tea.
I joined the blocks with simple white sashing to match the colour scheme and attached a dark blue border, with darker binding. I used subtle framing quilting so as not to obscure any of the blocks. As a final touch, I used hand stitching to embroider works on the blue border. These words had really stood out to me during the initial workshops and felt like the perfect way to bring the quilt together while referencing the work of artist and quilter Faith Ringgold.
Laura invited me to the opening of “The Sleepers” at Murray Edward’s College on September 18th. It was wonderful to see the full collection, including works by Tracy Emin and Jenny Polak, among others. The quilt stood at the very end of the gallery, its colours matching the painting at the beginning to bookend the collection.
I’m incredibly proud of this quilt. It may not be the most technical piece I’ve ever made but the process of creating it had an undeniable impact. When this exhibition ends, the quilt will return to The Cambridge Women’s Resource Centre to celebrate creativity and the reclamation of rest.
“The Sleepers” runs until 22 February 2026 and is free to view at Murray Edward’s College, Cambridge.
Below is Laura’s speech about the quilt, with a transcript.
Transcript
Our last work, this is our community quilt, which was made by some of the incredible people here this evening. So this community quilt was an idea I had about nine months ago, I thought it’s an exhibition about sleep, it wouldn’t be complete if there wasn’t a quilt in it - and I’m also a quilt maker so there’s a slight personal bias in this medium chosen. So what we did was we reached out to The Cambridge Women’s Resource Centre - some representatives are here this evening - which is an incredible resource in Cambridge for women here. And they help women with housing, with benefits, with learning English, with navigating poverty; an incredible service that we are very grateful to have here. And they also have an art group and when I spoke to them they said that their art group was so keen on crafts that it seemed like a perfect match to make this with them.
So Cait, the artist who made the quilt, and I did some workshops at The Cambridge Resource Centre and they were all given a square of fabric and through these workshops, Cait and I worked with the women to think about their personal relationships to rest, and to think about how they could depict that relationship on a square of fabric. And then all of the squares were put together in this beautiful quilt. You can see that all the colours are kind of cohesive together; the colours were drawn from the Bambou Gili painting at the very beginning of the exhibition so it kind of bookends the start and the finish of the exhibition. And Cait also made this decision to put phrases that people said at the workshops and stitch them round the border of the quilt. And for any of you who are familiar with the work of Faith Ringgold who always framed her quilts with text will recognise this as being inspired by her and also an artist who’s in the larger collection. I just while we’re here want to say a huge thanks to Backstitch Cambridge who generously donated the materials for this quilt, and the Art Society Cambridge who helped fund it as well, I’m very grateful. And I hope you can enjoy all of these different Cambridge Women’s relationships to sleep on their square of fabric. Enjoy the exhibition!