Textile expert Rose Sinclair gets MBE in New Year’s Honours

LONDON:

Rose Sinclair, a researcher, curator and academic in textiles and design, has received an MBE in the New Year’s Honours List for championing and making more visible the design practices of Caribbean women which have been overlooked for years.

A senior lecturer in the department of design at Goldsmith University of London, Sinclair’s MBE award also recognises her achievements in taking discussions on design and craft beyond academia through mounting community workshops across the UK.

It marks a 30-year period of work since she began collecting and researching black women’s crafts culminating in the major exhibition of Althea McNeish, a Caribbean-born designer whose work reshaped UK homes, but whose contribution was little known.

Born in London to Jamaican parents, Sinclair lived in Handsworth, Birmingham completed an Art and Design BTEC at Sutton Coalfield College before going on to a BSc in textiles at Huddersfield Polytechnic. She worked as a yarn designer for Coats Viyella and later retrained as a secondary school teacher becoming an early exponent of the emerging use of computers in textiles design.

Sinclair joined Goldsmiths in 1998 on a research fellowship after gaining an MA in Textiles from Central St Martins.

The driver for her research into black Caribbean women’s crafting came from an embroidered picture made by her grandmother celebrating her wedding in St Catherine, Jamaica. At the time Sinclair’s teaching was concentrating on the origins of craft practices, but the items from her relative remained on her mind:

“I didn’t see our stories,” Sinclair said. “I didn’t see my grandmother’s embroidery in any book or our crochet. I kept thinking why we didn’t see it. African and American craft was spoken about, but where was Caribbean craft?”

This omission led her to research the role of Dorcas clubs and the role they played in supporting and enabling crafting.

The clubs are named after Dorcas, a female Bible character known for her “good works and acts of mercy sewing clothes for the poor and who also taught the destitute to become makers of cloth”. Through missionaries the Dorcas tropes translated to the new world and were later conveyed in the re-passage of Caribbean immigrants arriving in the UK.

“The notion of Dorcas and charity gets built into black-led churches,” Sinclair explained.

“With migration to Britain the women bring that with them and within that space they found a sense of how to craft, to exchange knowledge, how to build social and spiritual networks. They also found a space where they could talk to each other about how to find a job, a house and how to decorate a space.”

Until Sinclair’s research, this history of black women and their crafting culture was invisible. “We didn’t know those stories of black women doing craft, but we are beginning to now,” she said.

Goldsmiths Warden Professor Frances Corner has no doubt about the significance of Sinclair’s work.

She said,“Rose Sinclair’s scholarship has made a unique contribution to design, broadening its perspective, and critically challenging its blind spots to acknowledge the craft and practice of African Caribbean women. (It is) through Rose’s work that we are beginning to both cherish and preserve them as part of our national story.

“Rose has also been a pioneer in finding new ways of taking and sharing her work beyond academia. She has made involvement in textiles and design a conversation with people and local communities across the UK.

“I can’t think of a recipient for the MBE more richly deserved or in recognition for services that were so vital.”

Ironically, Sinclair who lives in Bromley, south London, thought her work was an unlikely candidate for the MBE.

She recalled, “When the letter arrived it was in a white envelope with yellow writing that said Cabinet Office. And I said, “I don’t owe the tax man anything?” I thought I had done something wrong.”