ABSTRACT
As objects that are not simply seen, but felt and touched, quilts carry a profound emotional weight. They are used in everyday, repetitive, embodied activities: for sleeping and warmth. They also have a ritualistic role in lifecycle events: birth, marriage, death. They are by nature not simply functional, but modes of communication – memory cues, expressions of the psyche and extensions of the body – as well as sites of aesthetic investment, signalling both pleasure and distress.
In a handful of cases, generative paper templates survive within the layers of fabric and stitch. Assembled from ledgers, receipts, pamphlets and children’s exercise books, they produce a semi-flexible skeleton that changes the behaviour, meaning and reception of the textiles. They narrate everyday domestic encounters while also documenting the financial and emotional importance of paper itself.
This chapter offers a detailed study of the paper templates found in the V&A Museum’s collection to uncover the role of the quiltmaker as archivist of the domestic. Embracing a changing museological approach, it aims to reveal the full ‘body’ of the object and respond to our shifting understanding of paper not just as the carrier but the creator of meaning.
