The major spring/summer exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museum this year is ‘Quilts 1700-2010’. This exhibition showcases over 60 British quilts from the V and A collection with others loaned from museums and galleries in the UK and beyond. Displayed alongside these historical exhibits are some striking quilts made by contemporary artists including Tracey Emin and Grayson Perry. I would love to include some photographs in this post, but they appear difficult to find online. Have a look at the BBC’s special audio slideshow for a glimpse of some of them.

The exhibition is arranged around five themes: ‘The Domestic Landscape’, ‘Virtue and Virtuosity’, ‘Meeting the Past’, ‘Making a Living’, and ‘Private Thoughts – Political Debates’. A message that is both implicitly and explicitly communicated throughout is that these handmade domestic objects hold stories and histories in their very fibres. They are understood as texts as well as textiles. The curators have consciously probed the ways in which quilts can ‘document love, marriage, births, deaths, periods of intense patriotic fervour, regional and national identity and developments in taste and fashion’, reminding us also in the printed exhibition guide that quilts are ‘repositories of memory’, ‘acts of remembrance’, and ‘a form of meditation and consolation’.

While much of the beauty and interest of these objects lies in the colours, prints, patterns, and textures of the intricately pieced fabrics, often their makers added words too – names, dates, biblical verses, and short poems, for example. Indeed, many of the quilts demonstrate an explicit engagement with the power of visible text. Several commemorate coronations and military victories. On others, short sentences and poems emphasise the value of hard work and perseverance embodied in the material in which we read them, and on others, they provide spiritual advice and comfort. On a quilt made for a nineteenth-century military hospital, for example, verses from scripture appear on all four edges, so that they could be read by patients in neighbouring beds as well as by the person lying under the quilt.

One of the most moving exhibits for me was the quilt made last year by inmates of Wandsworth prison. The impressive craftsmanship of the panels on this quilt belies the hands that made them – those of male prisoners who had previously had little experience of what is traditionally seen as a domestic and feminine activity. On their quilt we read a collection of embroidered messages that are witty, entertaining, angry, disturbing, and sad. For these men, the quilt became a communal site for expression in words and pictures; the materials and methods of quilt-making provide the opportunity for communication with language via a creative engagement with materials. Compare this with the Rajah quilt, made in 1841 by women convicts onboard HMS Rajah as they were being transported to lands in the south Pacific. The tools and materials they used were supplied by Elizabeth Fry’s social reform project, and the words embroidered in a central panel on the quilt express the gratitude of the quilt’s makers for the creative opportunities this charity gave them during their long voyage.

Of all the quilts in the exhibition, Sara Impey’s recent ‘Punctuation’ quilt explores most explicitly a relationship between text and textile. Each tiny panel of her quilt is an embroidered letter, and together the panels play with phrases taken from a love letter to Impey’s mother that was discovered after her mother’s death. You can see images of similar works by Impey here. In this very consciously material text, Impey explores the popular idea that love letters were traditionally cut up to make the paper templates needed for piecing a quilt. The traditional materiality of the patchwork quilt becomes a medium through which to make sense from textual and material fragments, to re-read the past and to contextualise a fragmentary piece of documentary evidence from her mother’s life.

The juxtaposition of quilts such as this one with others made as many as three hundred years ago illustrates how the quilt continues to be a site of personal or political protest, debate, and subversion. While every quilt has its own story, some quilts stress their message in visible textual ways, inviting us to read them as we might read other kinds of material texts.

Sue Pritchard, curator of contemporary textiles at the V and A, writes a blog in which she explores many of the quilts in more detail. ‘Quilts 1700-2010’ runs until for ten more days, until 4 July.