4 Beautiful Obscenities of Virginia Woolf

Pressing Matters - Printing with Virginia Woolf

Exhibition at Sussex University Library

June - September 2025

Starting in 2015, the Beautiful Obscenities series is an ongoing project of abstracted sewn insults, donated to the artist from the public. Initially stemming from vulgar slander between loved ones, insults are hand sewn on embroidery wheels to challenge the domestic notion of Home Sweet Home and abstracted to create something else beyond the hurt. The words are still there, but the meaning and power have moved on. Over the years the series has developed to further question what constitutes an insult? Can an insult be a positive? Is it ever ok to hurl an insult?

As Co-Organisers of the 34th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Woolf & Dissidence, Michelle Abbott, Clara Jones, Anna Snaith and Helen Tyson have each selected one of Virginia Woolf’s insults to be abstracted and reinvented. Known for her spiky comments, Woolf was not shy of penning her thoughts on others—often direct, sometimes more discreet. Is it an insult or simply an observation?

‘arrant feminist’, from Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929), ed. by Anna Snaith (Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 27, selected by Helen Tyson 

‘a thin rigid trickle of a mind’, from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (Hogarth Press, 1977-1984), 4, p. 31, selected by Anna Snaith

‘in a tight dress’, from Woolf, Diary, 5, p. 303, selected by Clara Jones

‘over-dressed, over elaborate’, from Woolf, Diary, 2, p.75 , selected by Michelle Abbott