What is it about letting out a bellowed, full throttle “fuck” that makes whatever has just gone wrong feel just that teensy bit better? Or perhaps, like me, you prefer a drawn-out, crow-style “faaaaaaaaark” to really get it all out.
Down Whitstable way, a group of self-described “puerile potty-mouthed” women have found a way to prolong this emotional release. They’ve been sewing swearwords.
The Profanities Embroidery Group has been described by the comedian Kathy Burke as a kind of punk version of the Women’s Institute. Annie Taylor and Wendy Robinson, who set it up, say it all happened about 10 years ago “by accident and totally without a plan” and now, there are 30 or so regular members.
The group meets every other week in a local pub where, over “considerable amounts of gin” they stitch their ideas, thoughts and messages, politically – and always swearily – together. Once a year, this year in February, their work is shown in the Fishslab Gallery on Whitstable’s high street.
I found PEG after reading an article about Dame Judi Dench’s time on the set of Pride and Prejudice with Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen. Her work didn’t resemble the delicately stitched roses of Mrs Bennet, reported Macfadyen, “but was all ‘You are a cunt’ and she gives them as presents,” he said. “She’s doing all this beautifully ornate work. You kind of see the work materialising as the shoot goes on and it’s like ‘You are a fucking shit’.”
Shortly afterwards, Meta’s algorithm happily sent PEG’s Facebook page into my feed. Immediately I decided to go and see their annual show. Listening to JD Vance’s infuriating speech to European leaders had put me in the mood for expletives. The show’s theme this year, “What would you put in Room 101?”, also resonated.
Thirty works were displayed in a small, whitewashed gallery right in the heart of the seaside town. There were brightly coloured “litterbugs” made from felt and emblazoned with “Don’t be a shitter” and a splendidly embroidered front door to No 10, hung with the sign “No fly tipping, we’re already full of shit”.
There was a large, flaccid pink fleece penis sitting sideways with a picture of Elon Musk’s face on the shaft and “Toxique Muskulunity pour twats” stitched on to it.
Photo: Paola Totaro
I also loved an intricate scene of commuters on the London tube with one man, legs apart, taking the room of two and the words “Man spreading. Mind the Gap, knobhead”.
My favourite, however, and without doubt the most powerful and memorable, is a work still in progress that aims to re-record the extraordinary, ferocious and tragic words of a woman, Lorina Bulwer, who was placed in a workhouse in 1893, aged 55, classified a lunatic and kept incarcerated until her death in 1912. Bulwer, observed the artist Bridget Carpenter, was the eponymous “middle-class woman of a certain age” who, at a time when embroidery was neat, polite and pretty, stitched rants about her country, her doctors and her family using scraps of fabric sewn together, some as long as 12 or 14 feet.
She used no punctuation and stitched in capitals, letting fly with hundreds of messages of protest, outrage and furious gossip. Carpenter says recreating her work has given her an insight into just how therapeutic Bulwer might have found making her pieces.
“The underlining of key words is particularly satisfying as you stab the fabric, underscoring the words with your sharp needle.” It all made me think of the wisdom in the old saying: “stilling the mind by busying the hands”. Apparently, Bulwer’s spelling throughout was excellent except for three words – eunuch, hermaphrodite and majesty. Sadly, only three works survive, in Norwich Castle Museum and Thackray Museum of Medicine in Leeds. Those places are now in the diary for my next day trip.
Paola Totaro is an Italian-Australian journalist based in London
