This enquiry is a visual exploration of biblical historicity through textiles. It started as an investigation into the encoding and decoding of ancient languages and the representation and transmission of knowledge in encrypted form(s).
Initial iterative experiments included the encryption of the Baconian motto, ‘Knowledge is Power’ in letterpress and needlecraft, in Rosetta Stone-inspired triplets of ciphers and codes (Sherman, 2010), (The British Museum, 2017). These ideas pulled on historical threads, from the use of knitting to send secret messages during The War to the use of multilingual inscriptions to unlock languages (Chandler, 2020). Stitching these concepts together in a crochet translation of a snippet of a biblical manuscript, I invite a ‘reader’ to decrypt the text(ile) by providing a key, where each Koine Greek word works like a pictograph (Codex Sinaiticus, John 1:1-5), ().
Having considered the graphic communication of biblical text, I turned also to look at images which corroborate with the biblical narrative. At the British Museum, artefacts from different eras and empires are curiously cut from the same cloth: they all relate to people in the Bible. Using textile visual communication to interrogate this common thread, I embroidered and appliqued representations of different artefacts, resulting in a timeline/map/index of images. I consider, what does it mean for imposing, hard/stone artefacts to be depicted in cosy, soft/fabric forms? How do representations of these artefacts, taken out of their grand museum environment and into a new, gentler, more hospitable mode of interaction change the way a viewer can understand and interact with historical truths?
By translating biblical manuscripts and artefacts into textiles, I seek to make historical information accessible to and to pique curiosity among those interested in Judeo-Christian historicity. I also, in a sense, (with all due respect), satirise the great and fearful male-power-dominated empires of the past by reducing them to a medium historically relegated as “women’s work” (Lin, 2020).
References
- Chandler, N. (2025) ‘Crafty Wartime Spies Put Codes Right Into Their Knitting’. HowStuffWorks.com, 28 September 2020. Available at: https://history.howstuffworks.com/world-war-ii/spies-codes-knitting.htm
- Codex Sinaiticus (2009). Available at: https://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/manuscript.aspx?__VIEWSTATEGENERATOR=01FB804F&book=36&lid=en&side=r&zoomSlider=0
- Lin, B. (2025) ‘Textiles: The Art of Women’s Work’, sothebys.com, 7 March 2020. Available at: https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/textiles-the-art-of-womens-work
- Sherman, W. H. (2010) ‘How to make anything signify anything’, Cabinet Magazine, Winter 2010-2011. Available at: https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/40/sherman.php (Accessed: 10 February 2025).
- The British Museum (2025) ‘Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rosetta Stone’, britishmuseum.org/blog, 14 July 2017. Available at: https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/everything-you-ever-wanted-know-about-rosetta-stone