Since 2018 I have been working with blackwork embroidery collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum (London) looking at how contemporary art/craft practice can be used to study, reconstruct, interpret, and present these fragile and inaccessible textiles.

Object T.844-1974 is a linen panel intended to be made up into a coif, a commonly worn tight fitting cap often decorated with embroidery. Carefully examining the distribution of needle holes in this example suggests a rather intriguing proposition - that it had at some point been unpicked.
This linen panel, this unpicked, unstitched coif offers us possibilities, even as it poses questions to which we can never know the answer - who stitched it? why was it unpicked and never stitched again?
The idea then is a simple one - to explore this absence through contemporary embroidery practice by making the unstitched coif design freely available to anyone. You can download a copy of the design at www.blackworkembroidery.org.