The synchronicity involving my Lady and the Unicorn (La dame et licorne) textile
Written by Anne M Carson
For ‘EWF X Textile Message‘ as part of the 2025 Emerging Writers’ Festival
It’s wonderful to have the opportunity to share three of my passions. Firstly – George Sand – a 19th century French prolific novelist and social radical. I wrote a poetic biography comprising 160 poems about her which was the creative artefact of my 2023 PhD. I remain obsessed with and inspired by her. Secondly is the experience of synchronicity which I came to in the 1980s via the work of psychiatrist Carl Jung. He defined synchronicity as ‘meaningful coincidence’ and suggested that ‘meaning’ could be an ordering force in the universe.i These two – Sand and synchronicity come together beautifully in the body of this embroidery – a replica of one in the series called the ‘Lady and the Unicorn’ (La Dame et licorne) tapestries – considered to be 15th century French masterpieces.
I did this sewing in the 1980s. An example of ‘millefleurs’ (thousand flowers) tapestry, it features a noble woman holding the horn of a unicorn and surrounded by birds and animals as well as fruiting and flowering botanicals. The embroidery signified abundance to me, and as I was endeavouring to recover from burn-out from working in a domestic violence service; the positive invocation of harmony and plenty appealed.
The act of pushing a needle in and out of canvas may have been simple, meditative, but this was an ambitious project for a novice embroiderer. The work occupied many months during a long period of contemplative retreat, driven both by a motivation to become an artist and to become more embedded in the natural world. It was a time of metaphoric and literal stitching, weaving together threads of thinking and feeling, study and reflection, meditation and contemplation, with the act of embroidery.
As I stitched, I imagined becoming an artist and imagined what it would be like to feel harmonious – both within myself, but also within the world. This had previously seemed impossible in my work of witnessing the violence men (predominantly) inflicted on women. These new ideas became part of my active imagining, invoked with every stitch.
The project occurred in my primitive mud brick cottage on Melbourne’s outskirts, without electricity or running water; like so many women before me confined to sew only during daylight hours. There I experimented with being creative – trying different modalities. I painted, drew, took photographs; I wrote, and conducted my boutique handmade greeting card business using gold leaf and botanic specimens. I didn’t yet know which artform I wanted to pursue but writing had always appealed.
The embroidery took many months. When finished, I had it framed in rich mahogany tones and proudly entered it in the Healesville Agricultural Show, where it did not even get an honourable mention, despite what I considered to be a magnificent achievement. It hung on the walls in each of the homes I lived in over the years but as I had grown into being an actual artist, a poet, the ‘aura’ around the embroidery had dimmed, showing up, I hoped, instead in the artworks I created, principally in the poems I composed.
In 2019 the tapestry’s aura suddenly became luminous again. I had returned to study a Masters in Creative Writing in 2018, and in 2019 upgraded to a PhD. George Sand was to be the subject of my poetic biography.
The incident which brought the shimmer back to the embroidery was a 2019 visit to the Musée du Moyen-Age, Middle Ages Museum (Cluny Museum) in Paris whilst on my research trip.
It was an overwhelming experience to be surrounded by the tapestries. They were still vibrant, even after almost five hundred years. The colour was astounding, so rich it was almost heady, and I drank it in.
The accompanying notes discuss the tapestries’ provenance. I read that George Sand – my George Sand – had played a central role in their discovery; in the 1840s, mouldering and neglected in the Château de Boussac near her home in Nohant, in rural France.
George Sand was central to the saving the tapestries! It was a synchronicity not just linking me with George Sand, but extending over twenty years. This was a deeply effecting experience – I had grown close to Sand throughout the years of this project, visited her rural home at Nohant, and museums in Paris. But to know I had come so close to her, hovering in her vicinity (or she in mine) all those years ago as I stitched, felt uncanny, not knowing then that my eventual PhD would feature her.
I wrote a series of six poems describing this experience, and below is the second.
II
2020
Fittingly, it was the 19th century French writer
George Sand who was influential in popularising
and rescuing the tapestries.[i] Shona Martyn
My antenna thrum when I read these lines.
My tapestry, my George Sand! Royal blue
and vermillion flood my mind, fingers twitch
with the remembered act of slicking points
on embroidery yarn, piercing the needle’s
eye. All that I’d stitched into my psyche
returns; body pathways drum with the
transmission of electric thought. I thrum,
whirr, become. Creative woman, imagined
then, invoked on long and tangled threads
of desire. Longing saturates each stitch.
À mon seul desir, woven across the entrance
to thetent of la Dame. I had not then, but
la Dame has come through her travail, has
integrated wild energy of lion and unicorn,
to become a soul in harmony with herself.
Accounts differ as to who actually first found the tapestries. Some say Sand discovered them, then mounted a campaign for their recovery and repair, enlisting support from her one-time lover, Prosper Mérimée, Inspector-General of National Monuments. Another version has Sand and Mérimée finding them together on a visit to the Chateau.[i] Still other accounts erase George Sand entirely from the story of their discovery, and place her intervention later, around 1844 when she includes details of the tapestries in her novel Jeanne, and in a journal article[ii] as ways of garnering public support for their recovery and restoration. These accounts credit Mérimée alone with their discovery in 1841,[iii] and could be another example of the way Sand was omitted – or excised from the historical record.
George Sand and I share many things in common. She was also prepared to take radical steps to become an artist. Determined to find purpose in her life beyond being a wife and mother, she had also left an old life behind. She was ‘pulled’ to the French capital in the early 1830s by what she calls, “a kind of destiny”.[i]
… I felt it to be invincible, and I threw myself resolutely into it. Not a grand destiny – my creative imagination was as yet too unreliable for me to harbor any kind of ambition – but the destiny to be morally and artistically free …[i]
Sand went on to become one of the most famous writers of her era, penning over 90 novels, numerous plays and a significant number of non-fiction pieces.
Sand and I shared her impulse for moral and artistic freedom. My mudbrick retreat afforded the opportunity to study philosophy and change my life course. George Sand had also (in her teenage years), undergone an intense auto-didactically focussed time. Both of us had taken unusual steps to develop our capacity to think for ourselves and live our lives according to our own lights. We did both find moral and artistic freedom: she as a novelist and myself as a poet, joining the ranks of creative women through the ages who have contributed to culture-making.
Returning to the materiality of the textile itself. I love the names of the old dyes – woad, madder, cochineal, saffron, and the old world they evoke of painstaking hand-made manufacture. Many processes are needed to extract colours from these plants, which makes their achievement as cultural artefacts even more impressive. Remarkably, they have retained their lustre for over 500 years.
Works consulted
Jung Carl & Pauli, Wolfgang quoted in Maria Popova, “Atom, Archetype, and the Invention of Synchronicity: How Iconic Psychiatrist Carl Jung and Nobel-Winning Physicist Wolfgang Pauli BridgedMind and Matter” on Marginalia. Retrieved 17/9/24, https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/03/09/atom-and-archetype-pauli, n.p.
Martyn, Shona. “The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries bring mystery to the Art Gallery of NSW” in the Sydney Morning Herald, 19/12/17. Retrieved, 26/10/21. https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/the-lady-and-the-unicorn-tapestriesbring-mystery-to-the-art-gallery-of-nsw-20171218-h06c62.html
Sand, George. The Story of my Life: The Autobiography of George Sand: A Group Translation Edited by Thelma Jurgrau. New York, USA: The State University of New York Press, 1991.
“The Lady and the Unicorn” on Art Gallery of New South Wales website. Retrieved 31/8/20. https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/artboards/theladyandtheunicorn/.
“The Lady and the unicorn” on Wikipedia website. Retrieved 26/10/21. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_and_the_Unicorn.
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