POPPY NASH
15 MAY – 7 JUN 2025
OPENING 15 MAY, 6 – 8 PM
GLASSHOUSE is pleased to announce Kiss the Back of My Hand, a solo exhibition by Poppy Nash. Encompassing new textile works exploring the malleability of memory, this is the artist’s first exhibition with Gathering in partnership with Open School East’s new ‘Springboard’ programme.
Poppy Nash opens the jaws of the machine and jams cloth into its hoop. Scrunching and turning. Its needles judder to make each stitch. Threads escape before being drawn back to loop or break, around and again. The teeth of the digital embroidery machine chew, and Nash’s hands hold, wind, wrap, pick and unpick, to carefully adorn delicate textile works marked by the touch of both metal and skin. A red spotted shirt, a frayed denim sleeve, yards of cotton duck. Nash finds presence in the fabric’s movement, or perhaps uses movement to draw out the presence that is already embedded within it. Each textile fragment has already lived multiple lives: worn; unstitched from previous bodies of work; discovered in Nash’s studio corridor, awaiting discardment.
Nash calls Marie Lieb, Katharina Detzel, Agnes Richter, and Lorina Bulwer her historical interlocutors, but also her companions. Their images watch over Nash in her studio, as she retraces the twisting of their hands.
Isolated in a single room for two weeks, diagnosed with “mania,” Marie Lieb ripped up pieces of bed linen to create a garden of white stars on the floor of her cell. In photographs, fabric strips and tangled thread map a secret geography. A breath of air could blow it all away. In the background, tightly rolled skeins can be seen assembled, ready for deployment.
Katharina Detzel made a life-sized doll out of the ticking and straw that constituted her mattress in the clinic she was interned in after trying to sabotage a railway line. He has a long beard, spectacles, and a commanding air, a companion constructed from the material of her confinement.
After being hospitalised for “dementia praecox,” Agnes Richter used the coarse linen and felt of asylum uniforms to make a jacket with gigot sleeves and a nipped-in waist. The garment is stitched with script that crawls over the torso and around the sleeves, inside and outside, marked with sweat stains and repairs. A body transcribed.
From within the “lunatic ward” of a workhouse, Lorina Bulwer unfurled her internal voice onto a scroll of patched-together fabric scraps. In angular capital letters, she declares “I, MISS LORINA BULWER….”, over and over again: testifying. Though they appear to stream, the words are fixed in tight, staccato stitches.
Nash integrates fragments of Bulwer’s tract into her work, extrapolating phrases and enlarging them, allowing them to spill over the crannied textile layers like slogans on a windswept banner. The digital embroidery machine reinscribes both Bulwer and Richter’s sewn script with its teeth. “583,” Richter’s patient number, becomes a refrain across this body of work. As one of the few legible pieces of Richter’s embroidered text, it rises to the surface. In many areas, the meaning of the jacket’s text is submerged by the distortion of the script; the words that have been translated read as an autobiography in fragments. The many-pointed star, drawn from Lieb’s floor constellations, forms another leitmotif throughout the exhibition. In [I was..] found to be (2025), Nash reinstalls Lieb’s textile configurations using digital printing on cotton duck, setting them free from the hospital floor and transposing them onto the sky.
Each woman used the rigid parameters of their contexts to construct objects that barely contain the churning interiority of their makers. While the deliberate, incremental nature of embroidery does not often lend itself to gestural immediacy, Richter and Bulwer swell each stitch with feeling. Words are underlined, or spiral out into glossolalic flourishes; their legibility is secondary to the physical fact of their inscription. Researchers have found that Agnes Richter punctured the fabric with her needle many more times than was needed to stitch each loop of thread. By encoding their memories into fabric – intermingling the textual with the bodily – both Richter and Bulwer resist the total assimilation of their personhood into the flattening structure of the institution’s record-keeping, rooted in patient files and diagnostic categories.
Like her chosen forebears, Nash engages the rules of embroidery in order to stretch them. As she feeds unwieldy layers of fabric into the embroidery machine, thread buckles and breaks, outputting imagery transformed by the machine’s digital digestion. Precious scraps of silk are warped; pulled threads create extravagant, unexpected ruching; compressions and twists in the textiles lead to images that glitch in and out of legibility. Nash embraces this obscurity, reconstituting the women’s words through layers of fabric and thread. In doing so, meaning shifts, echoing the way memory is shaped and distorted as it is recorded.
As Bulwer’s phrases, Richter’s embroidery, and Lieb’s motifs nestle against fabric torn, twisted, painted, and bound by Nash’s hands, authorship is shared and sutured together. Nash’s making and archival research form nodes of connection between her practice and those of her forebears, a web of collective memories underpinned by a shared understanding of what it is to inhabit minds and bodies that, at times, act against themselves. In entangling her own experience of mental ill health and disability with the material testimony of those that came before, Nash proposes an approach to history as soft and pliable, inserting herself into its folds. KISS THE BACK OF MY HAND, Lorina commands, and Nash asks us to follow.
