From a formalist perspective, the facial features are stylised, veering

towards abstraction, linearity. The hair curls, and there are striking

vertical markings on the cheeks that are suggestive of West African ritual

scarification. Eyes – and ears – are open, mouth is closed. This face as

represented is not in the act of speech, but it is attentive. It is a face that

could be female, maybe male, or indifferent and undifferentiated. The

title maintains a gender neutrality, stating only that it is a Hieratic Head’.

Composed on a linen ground, most of the facial details are

embroidered. There are also three dark fabric panels. They are more

coarsely stitched on, in the manner of a quilt, the narrow rectangular

panels evoking in particular Kente strip weaving and its echoes in African-

American quilting traditions.

This Hieratic Head’ makes allusions that seem to be undercut by the

medium: the applied art’ of embroidery. Frances Richards attended the

Royal College of Art, where she received formal training in art and was

especially drawn to learning tempera and fresco painting. What about

embroidery, and quilting – where and when did she learn those craft

techniques? And why, given her training, did she choose to create toiles

brodées that evoke the kind of women’s work that was widely taught to

girls, rather than learnt in college? Perhaps it is not the title but the very

medium of embroidery that makes the strongest, and most poignant,

intellectual claim here, by pointing to our assumptions about the

materials and methods that are usually deemed suitable for artistic and

intellectual expression.

Commentary by Sophie White, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is the

author of Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (2012)

and the forthcoming Intimate Voices of the African Diaspora: Narrating Slavery in French America 2019.