What Pleasure? (1 of 12)

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, 100 Parliament Street

The 2016 series What Pleasure? draws on an archive of photographs Hurlstone discovered by Montague Glover, an architect and holder of a Military Cross for bravery in the First World War. Over several decades, Glover photographed intimate portraits of his lover and men to whom he was sexually attracted, from military guards on parade to the milkman on his daily round. In this image, a model is dressed in the uniform of the Royal Horse Artillery and 7th Hussars.
Consisting of 18 works, the series is discussed in Queering the Subversive Stitch: Men and the Culture of Needlework (2021, Bloomsbury; Joseph McBrinn), a book written in response to Rozsika Parker’s The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (1984; updated 2012). It is about the men ‘who took up needle and thread not only in support of liberating women from the structures of gender stereotypes but themselves too’. What Pleasure? also features in Professor Alice Kettle’s The Erotic Cloth (2018) and was highly commended at the International Triennial of Tapestry in Lodz, Poland, in 2016.

Nigel Hurlstone (born 1970) lives and works in North Wales. Following an MA (distinction) in Textiles, he was one of the first graduates to be awarded a PhD with practice by Manchester Metropolitan University in 2000. He has worked simultaneously as an artist, writer and senior lecturer for the past 20 years, and in 2014 established a studio in Ffynnongroyw, North Wales. Hurlstone addresses how art can be used in spaces of specific cultural and historical significance to challenge cultural norms and encourage dialogue. He has worked with international institutions, such as the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC, as well as community-based groups, museums and galleries in the UK, to present alternative narratives through art-based interventions. Recent work illuminating issues and inequalities in Health and Social Care has been shown at Collect (Saatchi Gallery, 2019), and as part of the National Gallery Masterpiece Tour in 2022. Currently, he is working on a substantial body of work supported by the Arts Council of Wales that employs stitched artefacts and storytelling to offer insight into the challenge and inequality of chronic illness and end-of-life care.

Places

Subjects

Materials & Techniques

Artist

Nigel Hurlstone (1970 - )

Title

What Pleasure? (1 of 12)

Date

2016

Medium

Textile - Digitally printed cotton organdie with machine embroidery in burmilana and cotton 30 thread mounted on cotton twill.

Dimensions

height: 128 cm; width: 94 cm; depth: 2.8 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from the artist, December 2022

Provenance

Purchased from the artist, December 2022, through the Art XUK project 2022-23

GAC number

19135