This thesis presents a new, critical study of the career and work of May Morris (1862-1938), an artist, writer, lecturer and leading figure of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Interest in Morris has grown in recent years, principally through the major exhibition May Morris: Art & Life (2017) and the accompanying publication May Morris: Arts & Crafts Designer (2017), which positioned the artist as an expert embroiderer and accomplished designer. Expanding on this scholarship, this study seeks to understand what the making of art meant for Morris and provides new information on and critical interpretation of her textiles, designs, making practices and writings. Textiles, above all embroidery, were the artist’s primary media, and this project focuses on her complex and persistent engagement with textile production. Concerned with questions of making and materiality, it adopts an innovative thematic structure that mirrors the layers of an embroidery – stitch, design and ground – through which the breadth and complexities of the artist’s practices and priorities as a designer, maker, lecturer and writer are explored.

The first chapter provides an overview of Morris’s career, which is examined through her principal contexts, spheres of activity and areas of enterprise. The following chapter addresses stitching as a form of artmaking that is expressive of the maker’s creative agency and reveals how Morris and her peers understood needlework within narratives of art’s prehistoric origins and its contemporary forms at the end of the nineteenth century. Chapter three focuses on the artist’s ambition and stylistic eclecticism in her design practice, and demonstrates the ways in which imagination and enlivenment were central to her designs as well as her interpretation of historical sources of ornament. Comparison is undertaken between the artist and her contemporary makers, scholars, curators and archaeologists, situating her thought within larger art historical debates. The final chapter, on ground, assesses the ways in which Morris kept pace with the revival of handweaving in the twentieth century, and her role within a culture of ethnographic research concerned with forms of spinning, dyeing and weaving by hand in the Outer Hebrides. Collectively, these chapters demonstrate that, for Morris, the making of art was multivalent and entangled in a syncretic mesh in which meanings were activated by and mobilised different conceptions of the ancient, modern, global and local, and which were variously changeable, competing and co-existent.