Valentine's jacket

If one attraction of archival research has always been the longed-for sense of proximity it can generate between researchers and their subjects, how close is too close? How does the experience of handling intimate correspondence compare to handling an item of clothing that is in fact a handmade love-token? What happens when traces of bodies collide with more conventional bodies of knowledge? What can the touch of fabric offer to our understandings of intimacy and materiality in creative archives? I take up these questions via an examination of a striking patchwork velvet jacket made for poet Valentine Ackland by her lover Sylvia Townsend Warner and held in the Dorset Museum. I challenge the idea of such objects as mere inert repositories of historical and informational content and instead highlight how these material traces of queer domestic and creative intimacies have the capacity to both unsettle and enliven our archival encounters.