The Generosity of Makers

A reflection on being a generous artist and being part of generous communities

A second essay copied over from Substack, where I am taking part in a summer essay-writing challenge hosted by Beth Kempton. This week’s prompt was Generosity. This is not the writing I planned over the course of this week. This is not the piece I sat down to write. It’s the piece that needed to be written. It’s a self-reflective exploration of generosity in my practice. I also want to write more about the generosity of other artists in my world, of the generosity of donations to museums and the generosity of people who give me old textiles to study, use, research and preserve, the generosity of those who set up or take part in collective making projects. All in good time.

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I don’t often give things away – not things I have made, anyway. Many textile makers are enormously generous in their gift-making and sharing their made-with-love efforts, but not me. Since I’ve become a professional textile artist, I tend to be making things for the purposes of exhibitions and commissions and publications. I rarely have the time or energy to make gifts, though I am very good at thinking of things I would love to make for others. I rarely have the time to make for myself either. I don’t often manage to make something for a charity auction or short-notice fundraising group artwork or collective, issue-based creative projects, simply because I don’t work like that, I don’t make things that can be ready quickly and the things that I do make are the fruit of hours, days, even weeks of development time and sometimes also making time. I can’t really afford to give things away in a physical sense as my work, my making, is fundamental to what I do give away: my ideas.

Early in my career I was told repeatedly that my work was very inspiring, that I was very inspiring. It’s great to hear this, encouraging to know that my work is having an impact, but inspiration doesn’t pay the bills, any more than the ‘exposure’ offered by organisations trying to get you to work for free. I resented being inspirational, which to me meant that my artworks were appealing to those without the means or inclination to buy, that other makers just wanted to learn how I did it and make it themselves.

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Alongside my art-making, I of course ended up creating a my bill-paying income stream that relied on that very inspiration, channelled through the medium of teaching textiles. I soon added writing sewing books to my catalogue of generous acts that I was only generous with because I was getting paid for them, if meagrely. It didn’t feel generous, it felt transactional, it felt exploitative (because it often was) and it felt like I was just giving all the time, without getting anything back. My artist practice, making textile artworks, was a separate entity to my paid work of teaching and the boundaries between these were unclear and problematic, at least to me.

When Pinterest was launched in 2012, one of my early pieces of work was all over it, getting 40 or 50,000 pins in a few weeks. I had a brief, weird sort of fame, or at least this one piece of my work did. That piece was borrowed for magazine shoots, shown in multiple exhibitions, on blogs all over the world; the image was everywhere. It never sold. In the end, 10 years after it’s 15 minutes of fame, I gave it to my mum. I loved that work when I made but in the end I felt disillusioned with the whole system and that piece of work is a reminder of that time – I gave away my ideas, my making, to inspire and illuminate and I got nothing back, nothing material, nothing concrete, nothing I could pay my bills with. I lost control of my intellectual property and with it my self-belief in the value of my artistic practice. While this experience of internet-fame was mixed to say the least, I did have huge positives from being online in those pre-social media, pre-smart phone days. In 20025, in the first months of being a freelance artist, I discovered sewing bloggers, women (usually) writing about their dressmaking and craft sewing, sharing and connecting across the world through a love of cloth and creativity. It blew my mind to find out that the internet could be like this, could be a meeting place of makers full of generosity. I found my people, my kindred. Sharing my work became fundamental to my creative life and, eventually, fundamental to making a living. It took some time and some ups and downs to see it, and to really feel the difference between being inspirational but taking the long view, 15 years on, I can see the positives and I can see how that time in my life, that work, that struggle to make a career, earn some money, any money, was complex and challenging, but ultimately worthwhile.

I continued to work through this feeling of frustration of being inspiring, effectively monetising this desire to learn from me through teaching and writing books, designing projects, making very little of my ‘own’ work, just enough build a little bit of a reputation as a textile artist alongside textile teacher and sewing project designer. It worked, on a small scale, and I built an almost sustainable career focusing on sharing what I learned, what I knew, what I understood from decades of studying historic textiles and adapting their forms to the modern aesthetic. As my chronic illness kicked in, I found the stresses of textile workshop teaching, all over the country, unsustainable and pulled back from that kind of work to establish my own teaching studio close to home. This worked for a while but it wasn’t the answer to creative fulfilment nor, it turned out, to financial security. I found teaching exhausting but I loved it. I still love it but it does not love me, my neurological mis-wiring does not cope with the adrenaline required for teaching, even on a small scale. What I loved most of all, what I miss most of all, is the holding of space for generosity and care. I loved the conversations around the table of women sitting and slowly stitching, gently creating meaningful things, meaningful experiences, and being generous with their stories, their ideas, showing others how to do things, remembering how they were taught, gifting the threads inherited from their granny to new friends they had just made, sitting next to them whilst sewing in that generous space. I love that community of women, that culture of care that can come from nowhere, through some ideas, some fabrics and some stories. These spaces are where I learned that my ‘artist practice’ and my paid work of teaching, writing, supporting others to make, were not two separate things. They are the same thing and I would be far happier once I understood and accepted this. My practice is the study, making and sharing of textiles and their stories, in all its forms. 

I love that textiles is overwhelmingly a female obsession, that it’s a hobby built around women creating in community. I didn’t grown up with that, I didn’t learn sewing with my granny, I didn’t discover sewing groups until I was teaching them, so I never had the pleasure of being a learner, a maker, in community. It’s a very special thing, that we tend to take for granted, or at least we did until Covid and then we all realised just how important it was to make alongside others, to see their hands moving over cloth, to share scissors and life stories.

Through Covid I learned to create online communities, to hold the space for a different kind of learning and collective practice, around research, narratives and exploring the why of our creative practice, more than the how-to. I learned, too, how generosity, how sharing my work, my ideas and thinking was more than giving away my intellectual property. Sharing, upon which my work now is founded, has given me so much more than I could have ever imagined. It is not a financial transaction where I sell you my stuff and creative ideas and you pay me, it’s far more nuanced and caring. I don’t sell my art work now, which is far easier than trying and failing to sell my work in the early days. I share it. I share through books, I share through courses, I share in my membership which is about the exploring of ideas behind the making, I share my passion for creating projects that involve people, create communities, inspire and enliven people and places. I share my knowledge and ideas and decades of research. I share my heart and soul every time I exhibit my work in galleries or on the tiny squares of Instagram. I battle with funders to raise the money to be able to share this stuff for free to the people who need it, the people it nourishes and inspires. I even, sometimes, share my making by stitching gifts for my nearest and dearest. I no longer resent being told I’m inspiring. I celebrate it. I want to inspire others, I want my artist practice to be about sharing stories, connecting people and understanding our histories. I am glad, grateful, that I failed to work out how to sell my artwork to rich people. I want the stories I explore in my work to be seen online for free, to be read about, to be visited in exhibitions, to be touched in workshops, to be seen in libraries and museums and to be part of the world. Art isn’t made for commerce, artists aren’t made for commerce. We are here to illuminate, to celebrate, to understand the world better. We are endlessly generous, we share the joy and the sadness of the world through our creativity. We deserve to get paid for it.