...he thought that the embroidery on her clothes was an armour that she created for herself against the things that assailed her.
Have you heard of Edith Harrington the embroiderer?
It’s very likely you haven’t, because Edith’s life was largely one of silence and containment. There is very little we know about her, except that she was a woman incarcerated and treated in Australia’s mental health system at a time when people with mental illness were held in places called “lunatic asylums”.
Edith was a patient in the female ward at Mayday Hills Asylum in Beechworth, in Victoria’s High Country, from about1950 until her death in December 1980: Mayday Hills
Inside Mayday Hills its recorded that she took to referring to herself ‘Dr Harrington’ while working to help the staff make the patients’ beds each day. And when she’d finished her work of making beds, Edith would take the drab pieces of clothing issued to her to wear and embroider them in the most striking ways. Perhaps it was to mark them as undeniably her clothes – her coat, her jacket, her pants - in a place where every patient was forced to wear the same drab government issued clothing. Why Edith Harrington made these interventions on embroidery on her clothes will never be known for sure. But we can recognise and acknowledge that what she created is spectacular artwork.
Embroidery as armour
We first learned about Edith Harrington and her embroidery after wandering into a remarkable gallery in Melbourne: The Dax Centre - named in honour of English born and trained psychiatrist Eric Cunningham Dax, who in 1952 was appointed to head the Victorian Mental Hygiene Authority. Home - The Dax Centre
In his role with the Victorian Mental Hygiene Authority for almost 15 years, Dr Dax began making seismic changes to the conventional system of mental health treatment in Victoria. One of these changes was the introduction of an art therapy program into Victorian psychiatric hospitals.
It's recorded that Dr Cunningham Dax knew Edith Harrington while she lived at Mayday Hills. He certainly knew of her embroidered clothing, and he thought that the embroidery on her clothes was an armour that she created for herself against the things that assailed her.
Dr Dax also theorised that Edith’s embroidery illustrated a kind of map – a way of reading how a disordered mind works when in the grip of serious illness. Neither of these theories were conclusively proven true. But when psychiatric hospitals in Victoria began closing and being de-commissioned from the late 1980’s (with Mayday Hills finally closing in 1998 nearly 20 years after Edith’s death) Dr Dax began trying to save the art created by patients of these institutions. Including Edith’s embroidered clothing. His collection of artworks created from within that now vanished era of psychiatric institutions, is housed in the Dax Centre in Melbourne. And Edith Harrington is also memorialised in the Mayday Project – an on-line archive of memories of the Beechworth psychiatric hospital for former patients, staff and the community. Edith Harrington – Mayday Hills
Here at CGT, we’ve talked about colour often in our blogs ( The Psychology of colour ) and we’ve reflected on the lived experience of mental illness among our remarkable community of stitchers and the importance of removing the stigma of illness and stitching as a form of self-care ( Elk and Tom Kate Biggs Amy Kallissa )
To stand in front of Edith Harrington’s embroidered clothes and allow your eyes to travel across the surface of these objects, to take in the riot of threads and different stitches, so dense in some places as to have completely re-made the original garment – is powerfully moving.
Edith’s embroidery, created in the saddest of circumstances – her indefinite incarceration as an asylum patient when the world believed people with mental illness should be kept hidden - has produced a remarkable re-imagining of institutional clothing. It is artwork that celebrates the core resilience of human creativity. And especially the resilience of women’s creativity with needle and thread. We salute you Edith Harrington.
