Pillow Talk
Referencing eighteenth-century samplers, Pillow Talk is a series of pillowcases embroidered whereby moral instruction is replaced with botanical prevailing attitudes toward women’s involvement in botany and science. Embroidery is reclaimed as a critical, feminist tool and the pillowcase, a domestic, utilitarian object typically associated with rest, dreaming, and intimate private space, is reclaimed to become a site of record and resistance. Through embroidery, these overlooked household objects preserve not only voices and values themselves, but the persistent historical barriers that constrained female botanical practice; they become archival fragments that document the counter-thoughts women have gone to bed with and the limitations that shaped their waking lives.
In the context of women's inaccessibility to Latin, the cross-stitch 'X-shaped' stitches evoke the illiterate’s signature mark, highlighting how even elite women were rendered effectively ‘illiterate’ in scientific discourse. Unlike other forms of stitching, the style carries no personal identity, its anonymity echoing the reality that when women did publish botanical observations, felt compelled to do so anonymously.
