Mending Maladies: Agnes’s jacket and her kinds

Lecture by Subhasree Biswas.

This research explores the intersection of women, madness, speech acts, embroidery, and healing. In recent years, Art Brut has flourished, generating new scientific and artistic knowledge. However, the work of women artists in psychiatric settings has been systematically overlooked or erased.

The late eighteenth century saw a phenomenon namely the “feminisation of madness”, the hysterical, melancholic were often women. Women were allowed to sew; it was used both for productive and non-productive purposes.

Mending Maladies is inspired by Agnes’s Jacket. Agnes Richter a seamstress was hospitalised in 1895 in Germany for mental illness where she stayed till her death.

Agnes used her straitjacket as a “diary.” She repeatedly mended, embroidered, and wrote a cryptic autobiographical text in her jacket. Which is now displayed at the Prinzhorn Collection in Heidelberg.

Agnes’s jacket not only tells her stories but their kinds, the stories, and visions of

altered state of mind. Similar instances, such as Karoline Ebbesen’s embroidered capes at Sct. Hans Hospital (1852–1936), reveal how textiles became a medium for self-expression among women in psychiatric care.

Beyond institutional settings, mainstream women artists like Tracey Emin, Louise Bourgeois, and Annette Messager have used embroidery as a form of autobiographical storytelling, protest, and catharsis in troubled times. Women writing on textiles is often autobiographical, poetic, political, in protest, as a confession. It is a representation of a cultural history which is not easy to erase.

Recent research says that there are therapeutic benefits of stitching. The repetitive and rhythmic pattern is meditative and calms the anxious brain.

My research focuses on the textual and visual practice of the silenced and the repressed. Making embroidered words a therapeutic or cathartic process.