Stitching Stories: Panel Discussion on the Terry Higgins Memorial Quilt

Stitching Stories: Panel Discussion on the Terry Higgins Memorial Quilt

Tuesday 14th May

7pm: Doors open

7.30pm to 8.30pm : Panel discussion

£5 + booking fee, includes a drink on arrival

Please join us in the Fitzrovia Chapel for a special panel discussion in celebration of the Terry Higgins Memorial Quilt, on display in the chapel between 8th-17th May.

Chaired by Richard Angell, Chief Executive of Terrence Higgins Trust, the event will be a chance to learn more about the aspects of Terry’s life represented in the quilt, as well as the history of AIDS memorial quilts and the broader tradition of memorialisation, storytelling and activism through quilting.

This event is wheelchair accessible.

If cost is a barrier to your attendance, please email [email protected] .

Panellists (final line-up TBC):

Chair - Richard Angell

(he/ him)

Richard became Chief Executive of Terrence Higgins Trust in March 2023. He was previously the charity’s Campaigns Director and interim Head of Policy & Public Affairs. Richard led a year’s worth of activity to mark 40 years since the creation of the Terrence Higgins Trust, including the creation of the Terry Higgins Memorial Quilt. Other key successes include an integral role in securing £20 million Government funding for opt-out HIV testing in emergency departments and leading on work to successfully overturn discriminatory exclusions in blood donation for gay and bisexual men and those primarily from the UK’s black communities.

Dr Jess Bailey

(she/ her)

Dr Jess Bailey is an art historian, writer, and third-generation hand quilter using techniques passed down in her family to make quilts for kin and community. Bailey has a first-class degree in art history from UC Berkeley where she also earned her PhD. She teaches in the History of Art Department at University College London. In 2023, she was awarded a Student Choice Teaching Award alongside eight other faculty members from across all disciplines at UCL. She believes how we speak about the past directly affects our collective futures.

Bailey is the author of Many Hands Make a Quilt: Short Histories of Radical Quilting (Common Threads Press, 2021) and runs Public Library Quilts (40.6k followers on Instagram.)

She has organized public programming on intersectional feminism and quilt history for Tatter Blue Library, NYC (The People’s Quilting Bee with Dr Sharbreon Plummer, 2023) and for Yale University’s center for the study of British art in London, the Paul Mellon Centre (Gender & Cloth, 2024.) She has guest lectured at Princeton, the Bard Graduate Centre, RSDI, and Williams College. Bailey makes community quilts in collaboration with grassroots organizers such as the Land in Our Names Quilt with Decolonize the Garden (19K raised for Black land reparations), the Gay Okay Quilt, and the Kin Folk Archive Quilt.

Bailey has held research fellowships in the US, EU and UK. She moved to London in 2020 as a predoctoral fellow at Wellcome Collection.

Paula Doyle

(she/ her)

Paula has been a full-time quilter for over 25 years, and enjoys all aspects of quiltmaking under the Green Mountain Studio label in Surrey. She spent her childhood in Brazil, was taught to use a sewing machine at the age of nine and made her first patchwork cushion at the age of ten under instruction from her grandmother.

Paula was approached in 2013 to design a quilt project to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the sealing of the Magna Carta at Runnymede, where the terms of the Magna Carta were set forth and agreed between King John and his Barons in 1215. This resulted in the formation of the Magna Carta Quilt Association, and the Magna Carta Quilters, a group of 25 talented quilters who produced a series of 8 quilts for the anniversary festivities at Royal Holloway University. The Magna Carta Quilts have since been on display in Houston and Chicago as well as other venues around the UK, and are now in the permanent collection of The Quilters Guild of the British Isles.

Paula worked with Terry’s partner and co-founder of Terrence Higgins Trust, Rupert Whitaker OBE, to design and produce the “Rupert’s Tribute” panel of the quilt.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Fitzrovia Chapel, 2 Pearson Square, London, United Kingdom