An artist's tranquil Georgian flat in Bloomsbury
‘These bits of pink came from Great Aunt Brenda’s nightdress, she lived to 104!’ says Monica Grose Hodge pointing out a flower petal in one of the magnificent rag pictures hanging in her London flat. Making rag rugs was a tradition in mining families in the 19th and 20th centuries, where strips of worn-out clothes were hooked or poked into a mesh backing, often a hessian sack, to make a cosy fireside rug.
During lockdown, Monica, who ‘always has to be doing something with my hands’, had a pile of textiles, old and new, in her London flat, including the much-darned rose-pink silk satin nightdress, a pale lemon jersey, felted in an accidental hot wash, and lots more pieces – lurex, cotton, silk and velvet, in every possible shade – most of which had been given to her. She wondered what to do with them. ‘I couldn’t just throw them away.’
In traditional rag rugs, the different fabrics would have been used randomly, or in simple stripes. Monica used hers to make pictures, inspired by the typical leaf and flower forms of 16th and 17th-century crewel work. The old fabrics are torn into thin strips, leaving intriguing hairy edges, then hooked into a background of hessian mesh. Monica took a vernacular craft, and found she had created a new, and highly decorative, art form.
Despite having won a drawing competition at the age of 11 and a sixth form art scholarship, Monica, who is dyslexic, followed a traditional, parent-led route, reading Spanish at Edinburgh University. Later, while working in New York as assistant to the legendary Penguin publisher Peter Mayer, she got a call from a university friend, the designer Ben Pentreath, who rang her to ask what life was like in New York. He was thinking of moving there. ‘He spoke for 45 minutes and didn’t draw breath!’ she says. He came. Their time in New York cemented a life-long friendship. ‘His student flat was exactly his taste today; he really was fully formed even then’. But it was Peter Mayer, who knew she was a keen lino cutter, who told her ‘You have to go to art school’.
So, aged 30, she returned to Britain, and on graduating from the London College of Printing became assistant curator at the Arts & Crafts Emery Walker house, where the wallpaper designer Marthe Armitage was a trustee. When the post of Secretary of the Art Workers Guild, the society for artists and craftsmen founded by William Morris, became vacant, Ben Pentreath and Marthe both rang to tell her to apply. ‘I wanted to be in the art world, even if I couldn’t be an artist myself’ she says. She had fourteen very happy years working in this bohemian club, and this is where, surrounded by the artist friends whose works hang on her walls, she is exhibiting her own rag pictures.
Her first floor flat, in a quiet double-fronted 1830s house in Bloomsbury, rapidly became a workshop. ‘When I bought the flat 25 years ago, it had a strange arrangement with a tiny corridor and a useless L-shaped bedroom. I knew immediately I would knock down the corridor, knock down the wall between the two main rooms, and incidentally, knock tons off the value of the flat!’ she says. With the wall between the two main rooms removed, a glorious wide space was revealed.
When she moved into the flat Monica had almost no furniture and slept on the floor at first, until the artist Alan Powers provided a day bed. Later when she had ‘a bit of money’, Ben Pentreath and the architect William Smalley, another friend, came to dinner and sketched the changes the flat needed ‘on the back of a napkin’.
Fussy cornices and fireplaces, Victorian additions, were replaced by simpler versions, the shutter-boxes that articulate the long wall of the main room were re-instated, and William Smalley re-designed the bathroom. ‘He wanted me to use marble throughout, but I compromised with marble-look tiles for the walls’ she says. Family and friends passed on furniture, she re-painted her mother’s reproduction dining chairs in a subtle orange, re-upholstering the seats herself, a family sofa was covered in a tobacco brown tweed, and a friend whose boyfriend couldn’t abide her leather and chrome chair passed it on to Monica. Mid-century modern bookshelves and cabinets were found on Ebay and at local shops.
‘The walls are a very pale warm grey and I kept the rest of the scheme to soft brown tones, with all the frames in natural wood, to make a good background for the pictures - nearly all by my friends,’ she says. Colour bursts in with the vivid yellow of the roman blinds on the tall windows, which are ‘wonderful in the early morning sun’ Monica says.
With the rag pictures Monica has made works of striking beauty, but the picture-hung walls of her flat are the testament to perhaps her greatest gift, that of friendship. Every piece has a story, and it is significant too, that for Great Aunt Brenda, Monica was there to the end.
Monica's exhibition The Rag-Garden Stories is running at The Art Workers Guild until Saturday, 21 December 2024: artworkersguild.org
Jasper Fry1/9From left to right is a polar bear picture by Amanda and Matt Caines, Monica’s Arles rag picture, a framed piece of Marthe Armitage’s Chestnut design wallpaper. In front is a monochrome vessel by Lydia Hardwick.
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Jasper Fry5/9Above the mid-century kitchen table with its pattern of stylised flower is an Italian Futurist print and a lino cut, Two Dogs Running, by Christopher Brown. On top of the chimneypiece is a line-up of an alabaster jar from Egypt, a dried sunflower from the Cevennes, feathers, coral and shells, and a face painted on a flower pot with, inside it, a stone from Petra.
Jasper Fry6/9A lobby with a bookcase of all blue-covered books, and storage leads into the bathroom. The colour was chosen so as not to ‘disturb the harmony’ of the warm brown notes in the main room. The architect William Smalley re-ordered the tiny bathroom, putting the bath under the window and edging it with marble. Monica chose to cover the walls in marble-like tiles.
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Jasper Fry8/9The bedroom with Martha Armitage’s ‘Jungle Birds’ wallpaper on a white ground. On trip to Venice Monica bought the chandelier in Murano, directly from the glass blower and brought it back in her luggage.
Jasper Fry9/9Monica’s rag picture Kingfisher hangs above the chimneypiece. A 1930s ceramic calf by the sculptor John Skeaping RA for Wedgwood was a present from her Great Aunt Brenda.
