Lydia Donohue

I am a doctoral researcher in visual anthropology focusing on the community of quiltmaking and patchwork in northwest England. My project investigates the gendered forms and meanings of storytelling and memory-making that emanate from the shared material practices of stitching, showing, touching, curating and conserving quilts. Positioned as a long-term apprentice within these craft worlds, this interdisciplinary project unpicks the network between crafters, their tools of making and their objects of creation to examine the everyday lived and retold through the material. In engaging with the quilt within my ethnographic fieldwork, I foreground sensorial handling, arts methods, and embodied practice to explore the skilled community and reflect the experience of research.

My research centres on materiality, collective making, crafts practice and creativity. I also draw in themes of ‘smart-textiles’, future-orientated design and the interdisciplinary space of science + art.

Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology