Writing in 1909, the Arts and Crafts illustrator, Olive Cockerell, and her partner, Helen Nussey, opened their account of their alternative farming experiment with the line ‘We are two Women’, asserting their partnership. Their movement out of London and onto the land was not unusual amongst women of the Arts and Crafts movement, particularly amongst queer women.

This talk explores how the ecological ideas and imagery of the Arts and Crafts movement provided a multifaceted visual language for women to explore, express and communicate elements of queer sexuality. Considering May Morris and Olive Cockerell, amongst others, this talk hopes to shed light upon the important presence of queer women within the Arts and Crafts movement, and propose that queer art-making can be viewed and studied as a queer ecology.

Alice Dodds is an art historian specialising in women, craft and ecology in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain. She has recently completed an MA at the Courtauld Institute on women and anti-modernism in the work of Clare Leighton, and has run practice-based outreach projects on environmentalism and queer history for the William Morris Society.

Images: Morris Cranbrook Embroideries (cover) and Cockerel illustration from ‘A French Garden in England (below)