The Pillow Archive
Referencing eighteenth-century samplers, the Pillow Archive is a series of embroidered pillowcases in which moral instruction is replaced with quotations that expose prevailing attitudes toward women’s involvement in botany and science. Embroidery is reclaimed as a critical, feminist tool and the pillowcase, normally a domestic, utilitarian object associated with rest, dreaming, and intimate private space, is transformed into a site of record and resistance. Through embroidery, these overlooked household objects preserve not only voices and values themselves, but also the persistent historical barriers that constrained female botanical practice; they become archival fragments that document the counter-thoughts women carried to bed and the limitations that shaped their waking lives.
In the context of women's exclusion from learning Latin, the cross-stitch's repetitive X-shape evokes the illiterate’s mark, underscoring how even elite women were rendered effectively ‘illiterate’ within scientific discourse. Unlike other forms of stitching, cross-stitch carries no personal identity, its anonymity echoing the reality that when women did publish botanical observations, they often felt compelled to do so anonymously.
For a full list of quotations click here.
