Beyond the Baize
The Old Entrance Hall Commission
The Whitaker Museum and Gallery
Set in the hallway of the Whitaker museum - a space of both arrival and division - Beyond the Baize explores the tensions and dualities of female labour, visibility and value in the domestic and industrial histories of Victorian north. Once a private entrance to a home owned by wealthy mill industrialists, here the hallway becomes a site of transformation, an echo chamber of female presences, both erased and encoded.
The installation uses green baize cloth - a dense woollen fabric widely used in Victorian life, from lining writing desks and card tables, to uniforms, upholstery, and polishing. Often hung on doors to muffle the sounds of labour - clattering plates, hurried footsteps, whispered orders - baize became a fabric of soft suppression. Its sound muffling surface served both elegance and control, silently upholding the rituals of civility. But this silence was never neutral; it was a classed and gendered suppression that divided the world of work and display. Baize is deeply material: it anchors the domestic to the industrial, linking the hallway to its production at New Hall Hey Mill, visible just beyond the house, and to the broader textile economies of colonial capitalism that processed wool, teasels, bayetas – and bodies.
A green baize curtain hangs in the hallway, its surface soft yet weighted with historical resonance. Beside it, small, flocked shelves hold domestic tools – a donkey stone, a flat iron, a carpet beater - elevated as quiet monuments. Together they speak of the tension between care and constraint, evoking the precarious balance of social mobility, invisibility of upkeep, and the relentless demands of hard, often gendered, labour.
Atop mirrored shelves, trimmed with tassel fringe, sit objects of refined civility: fine porcelain China. These are emblems of hospitality, ritual and respectability - markers of status that carry the legacy of colonial extraction and class performance. They are speckled with green baize flock, a reminder of the complexity of class.
The inclusion of porcelain in this installation serves as a poignant symbol of the intricate interplay between domesticity, femininity and socio-economic structures. The production of delicate fine porcelain provided employment while creating commodities that came to symbolise refinement and aspiration. These pieces, prized for their iridescent glaze and gossamer thinness, were markers of taste and class, often displayed at high tea, a ritual of civility rooted in gendered performance.
The presence of porcelain evokes the double bind of feminine respectability and invisibility. The ‘lady of the house’ was both the public face of domestic virtue and a participant in the labour of display. Meanwhile, the less visible women laboured to sustain that virtue, their effort masked by the aesthetics of the tea service. This duality of presence and erasure is encapsulated in the fragile opulence of the fine porcelain.
The hostess, the lady of the house - the ornamental anchor of the domestic realm - while surrounded by elegance and tasked with civility, she too was constrained by the symbolic architecture of her time. Her domain was hospitality, but her role was coded; demure, compliant, spoken for. Respectability was her currency, but she was still a commodity – displayed, managed, often silenced. In contrast, the female servants – maids, cooks, laundresses - performed the bodily, repetitive labour that maintained the spectacle. Yet both were bound to systems that measured female value in utility, virtue and visibility. In this threshold space, the ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’, the served and the serving, collapse into one.
Drawing on Marx's analysis of the commodity, Luce Irigaray’s feminist reworking of it, Silvia Federici’s accounts of reproductive labour and Jane Rendell’s writing on gendered space, Beyond the Baize critiques how women across class strata have been rendered into roles of use and exchange value. Here, both the hostess and the maid serve symbolic and economic functions; their labour is essential yet veiled, their voices are constrained - both materially and ideologically - framing domesticity as duty, and femininity as spectacle.
Yet within that silence is potential. As the Victorian age advanced, the very women once bound by spectacle and ritualised hospitality began to stir – middle-class women at tea tables became suffragettes in the streets. Protest, too, was coded as duty. The hallway becomes a metaphor for this in-between space: between hosting and haunting, between silence and revolt, between soft power and raw resistance.
The Hallway, with its muffled echoes and curated silence, becomes a liminal space – a site between visibility and erasure, duty and desire. It invites the viewer to pause, to
reconsider what constitutes value, labour and legacy. It asks not only who served and who was served, but who was allowed to speak, to be seen, to leave a trace. In its reflection on the past, it gestures to the present: a time when the position of women remains unresolved – still in transition, still negotiating thresholds.
In the interplay of porcelain and felt, baize and fringe, utility and ornament, this work resists easy categorisation. It blurs the lines between object and subject, labour and leisure, history and haunting. And in doing so, it holds space – a threshold – for the spectral presence of women who moved through these spaces unseen, but who shaped them, nonetheless.
The installation uses green baize cloth - a dense woollen fabric widely used in Victorian life, from lining writing desks and card tables, to uniforms, upholstery, and polishing. Often hung on doors to muffle the sounds of labour - clattering plates, hurried footsteps, whispered orders - baize became a fabric of soft suppression. Its sound muffling surface served both elegance and control, silently upholding the rituals of civility. But this silence was never neutral; it was a classed and gendered suppression that divided the world of work and display. Baize is deeply material: it anchors the domestic to the industrial, linking the hallway to its production at New Hall Hey Mill, visible just beyond the house, and to the broader textile economies of colonial capitalism that processed wool, teasels, bayetas – and bodies.
A green baize curtain hangs in the hallway, its surface soft yet weighted with historical resonance. Beside it, small, flocked shelves hold domestic tools – a donkey stone, a flat iron, a carpet beater - elevated as quiet monuments. Together they speak of the tension between care and constraint, evoking the precarious balance of social mobility, invisibility of upkeep, and the relentless demands of hard, often gendered, labour.
Atop mirrored shelves, trimmed with tassel fringe, sit objects of refined civility: fine porcelain China. These are emblems of hospitality, ritual and respectability - markers of status that carry the legacy of colonial extraction and class performance. They are speckled with green baize flock, a reminder of the complexity of class.
The inclusion of porcelain in this installation serves as a poignant symbol of the intricate interplay between domesticity, femininity and socio-economic structures. The production of delicate fine porcelain provided employment while creating commodities that came to symbolise refinement and aspiration. These pieces, prized for their iridescent glaze and gossamer thinness, were markers of taste and class, often displayed at high tea, a ritual of civility rooted in gendered performance.
The presence of porcelain evokes the double bind of feminine respectability and invisibility. The ‘lady of the house’ was both the public face of domestic virtue and a participant in the labour of display. Meanwhile, the less visible women laboured to sustain that virtue, their effort masked by the aesthetics of the tea service. This duality of presence and erasure is encapsulated in the fragile opulence of the fine porcelain.
The hostess, the lady of the house - the ornamental anchor of the domestic realm - while surrounded by elegance and tasked with civility, she too was constrained by the symbolic architecture of her time. Her domain was hospitality, but her role was coded; demure, compliant, spoken for. Respectability was her currency, but she was still a commodity – displayed, managed, often silenced. In contrast, the female servants – maids, cooks, laundresses - performed the bodily, repetitive labour that maintained the spectacle. Yet both were bound to systems that measured female value in utility, virtue and visibility. In this threshold space, the ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’, the served and the serving, collapse into one.
Drawing on Marx's analysis of the commodity, Luce Irigaray’s feminist reworking of it, Silvia Federici’s accounts of reproductive labour and Jane Rendell’s writing on gendered space, Beyond the Baize critiques how women across class strata have been rendered into roles of use and exchange value. Here, both the hostess and the maid serve symbolic and economic functions; their labour is essential yet veiled, their voices are constrained - both materially and ideologically - framing domesticity as duty, and femininity as spectacle.
Yet within that silence is potential. As the Victorian age advanced, the very women once bound by spectacle and ritualised hospitality began to stir – middle-class women at tea tables became suffragettes in the streets. Protest, too, was coded as duty. The hallway becomes a metaphor for this in-between space: between hosting and haunting, between silence and revolt, between soft power and raw resistance.
The Hallway, with its muffled echoes and curated silence, becomes a liminal space – a site between visibility and erasure, duty and desire. It invites the viewer to pause, to
reconsider what constitutes value, labour and legacy. It asks not only who served and who was served, but who was allowed to speak, to be seen, to leave a trace. In its reflection on the past, it gestures to the present: a time when the position of women remains unresolved – still in transition, still negotiating thresholds.
In the interplay of porcelain and felt, baize and fringe, utility and ornament, this work resists easy categorisation. It blurs the lines between object and subject, labour and leisure, history and haunting. And in doing so, it holds space – a threshold – for the spectral presence of women who moved through these spaces unseen, but who shaped them, nonetheless.