Britton’s materials are sourced and constructed near her home in North Carolina, embedding the work within a specific regional history. For over a century, North Carolina was a dominant force in textile production. Historical accounts reveal that enslaved labor was foundational to North Carolina’s early textile industry, shaping everything from cotton cultivation to fabric production. These layers, then, hold the weight of exploitation and industrial expansion.
Moreover, some of Britton’s Draperies closely resemble elaborate, voluminous skirts, evoking the figure of the Southern belle. This reference blends seamlessly with the resurgence of Southern Gothic aesthetics that you may have seen flooding your social media in recent years. Dr. Ahmed Honeini, founding director of the Faulkner Studies research network, explains that “the Southern Gothic remains so important because so many of its key texts urge the kind of confrontation with history” shaped by reacism, slavery, and misogyny.
Cultural commentator and TikTok sensation The Woodmother similarly describes the genre as exposing “the grotesque and unnatural and unsettling things that we live with…It forces us to face the flaws of this complicated legacy of faded glory.” Britton’s work operates within this tradition. By invoking familiar forms while embedding them with ambiguity, she asks us to confront what has been historically beautified or ignored.
Further, textile work has historically been categorized as “women’s work,” confined to the domestic sphere. Within this limitation, women created their own forms of expression. These practices became tools of resistance. Suffrage activists, for example, repurposed crafts traditionally associated with the domestic sphere—such as embroidery, quilting, and other textile practices—to make public political arguments in support of women’s suffrage.
Britton’s use of repurposed bedding adds yet another layer. In an era of overconsumption, her work suggests that creation does not require newness—it requires transformation. The reuse of materials becomes both an environmental gesture and a conceptual one: a reclaiming of what has been discarded, whether fabric or history.
Lauren Elkin, author of Art Monsters, explains that this turn to textile art is the “product of the renewed interest in the stories and art-making of women and other marginalized people, a way to feminize and decolonize the gallery space, to ask questions about labour and exploitation, about climate and extraction. More likely, it’s some combination of these factors, intertwined, impossible to separate.”
All of these layers combined tell a rich story—one of recycled and repurposed histories, of rebellion and dissent, and of reclaiming and reimagining the world around us.
As Elkin says, “the turn to textile is a return to…physical intimacy, at a time when we are being told that bodiless, screen-based AI is the future to which we are all condemned. How glorious it is to revel in the look of thick, twisted, heavy, messy, multicoloured yarn!”
By Bridget Brickley, Halsey Institute Intern
College of Charleston, Class of 2027
Communication and Philosophy majors