Mapping What Was Left Unsaid: Reflecting on Dr Jane Hattrick’s Talk for Pride Month

We’d like to start by thanking Dr Jane Hattrick for her fascinating and thought-provoking talk, delivered as part of Pride Month for Norfolk LGBT+ History Club at The Forum. Her work continues to open up vital conversations about how queer histories are researched, interpreted, and, crucially, presented (or not presented) in museums.

At the centre of Jane’s talk was the relationship between textile designers Hilary Bourne and Barbara Allen, collaborators and partners in both life and work. Through her discussion of the Double Weave exhibition at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, Jane explored the challenges of acknowledging their relationship within a museum context. Despite decades spent together, the museum tried to avoid describing them as a “couple” in its interpretive texts, citing a “lack of hard evidence;” something Jane fought hard to challenge.

Pride Month is the ideal moment to reflect on this reluctance. While institutions may be increasingly willing to include LGBTQ+ narratives, there is still a persistent caution when it comes to explicitly naming queer relationships of the past. Concerns about “visitor sensitivities” or institutional risk can result in watered-down interpretations that prioritise comfort over truth. As Jane’s talk made clear, this is not a neutral omission. It actively shapes whose lives are recognised and whose remain invisible.

This tension and frustration came through in the audience discussion. One comment in particular captured the mood in the room, noting that “by the standards of what the government would call a couple to cut down the amount of universal credit they gave you, many queer couples dismissed as friends would definitely be counted as couples by this logic.” It was an astute observation, which highlights that in some contexts, institutions are more than willing to define relationships as intimate when it suits them, yet other often hesitate to do the same.

This hesitation speaks to a wider issue in museum practice. As Jane highlighted through José Esteban Muñoz’s writing, queerness often resists the kinds of physical documentation or evidence institutions have historically insisted upon. Munoz writes that: “Queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence…” and to document a queer past we should look to ephemeral evidence such as gesture, considering “queerness as trace, the remains, the things that are left, hanging in the air like a rumour.” Queer history exists in fragments: traces that linger “like a rumour.” When museums demand conventional forms of proof, they risk erasing exactly the histories they claim to wish to preserve.

One of the most striking moments of the talk was Jane’s visual mapping of relationships between Hilary and Barbara, and the women who were involved with their creative practice – some of whom were also couples. It highlighted not only the creative and professional connections between these artists, designers, and makers, but also the intimate and emotional bonds that linked them. The map, which Jane created on calico and displayed for us, made clear that these women were not isolated individuals, but part of rich, interconnected queer tapestry that is too often flattened or obscured in traditional historical narratives.

Jane’s work asks us to think differently about evidence, and about responsibility. If we accept that queer lives have often been hidden, coded, or deliberately obscured, then waiting for definitive proof risks continuing that silence. Instead, we should approach archives more imaginatively and more honestly. We must recognise the limits of what survives, but make space for the lives and relationships that those fragments point towards.

As we celebrate Pride Month, Jane’s talk reminded us that visibility is not just about the present. It is also about how we interpret the past, and whether we are willing to name what has too often been left unsaid.