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Ours is ... a time when traditional ways and means of being the church are under threat and changing. New ways of engaging people with the Christian message are needed.1
Over the past 50 years or so, embroidery has come a long way in its efforts to gain recognition as an art discipline alongside painting, sculpture, architecture and stained glass. Indeed, only two years ago, the Turner Prize entries included nine canvases by Michael Raedecker, where the surfaces of the landscapes were astonishingly articulated in stitch.
Across a similar period, the Church, already a powerful patron of the arts, has done much to engage with modern art and aesthetic. This movement, instigated by senior clergy such as Walter Hussey, Rector of St Matthew's Church, Northampton, and later Dean of Chichester Cathedral, can be clearly seen for instance in the introduction of works by John Piper and Graham Sutherland in Coventry Cathedral, by Anthony Gormley in Winchester Cathedral, by Bill Viola's temporary video installation in Durham Cathedral and Craigie Aichieson's painting in Liverpool Anglican Cathedral. Increase in interest in the role of the arts in Churches can also be seen in the advent of the Arts & Christianity Enquiry, which pursues its debate through bulletins and periodic conferences hosted by eminent bodies such as Tate Britain. Moreover, it was reported in the Church Times in October 2002 that no less than 30 bishops were to be taken to Tate Modern to engage with theology and art through, for example, the works of Mark Rothko and Joseph Beuys.2
It seems surprising, therefore, in view of the advances in stitched textiles being witnessed not least through Embroidery, and of the effort being made by the Church to engage with contemporary fine art as an alternative means of access to the spiritual, to find so few aesthetically and metaphorically demanding textiles in churches.
In her recent history of ecclesiastical vesture, High Fashion in the Church, Pauline Johnstone comments on a revival post-1950 of a 'remarkable flowering in embroidered vestments in a completely new and contemporary style', thanks of course to the skill, verve and enthusiasm of Beryl Dean.3 Dean's influence resulted in a flourishing of cathedral guilds, parish groups and individuals producing vestments that exhibited high technical expertise.
Alice
Kettle: Altar frontal, Winchester Cathedral, Holy
Sepulchre Chapel
1994. Machine embroidery. Metal, silk and cotton thread.
99 x 254 x 107 cm.
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the image to see a bigger
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Yet, apart from the work of Dean herself, and of relatively rare textile artists such as Alice Kettle, Evelyn Ross, Rozanne Hawkesley and Judy Barry, it can be argued that much textile design being put into the church is returning to the spiritual rut seen in the first half of the 20th century. There is little evidence of design for church vesture, and especially wearable vesture that could be described as metaphorically demanding.
Given this state of affairs, there would seem to be an urgent need to put the question: Whose fault is it?
First, it would seem that the church itself is at fault. Despite an apparent engagement at the highest levels with the potential of modern art, there seems to be a blindness to, or ignorance of, the aesthetic and spiritual potential of textiles, especially with regard to robes.
Churches need the familiar, but if there is a rigid adherence to convention, then there is no challenge to congregations to push beyond the comfortable toward the boundaries of faith and to explore the implications of religion. Is there not an equal potential in textile art as elsewhere for finding the spiritual in the unconventional, let alone the extreme? 'God', says the Archbishop of Canterbury, writing in the same breath of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and St Mark's Gospel, 'Becomes recognisable as God only at the place of extremity, where no answers seem to be given and God cannot be seen as the God we expect or understand. 4
Victoria
Richards: Millennium vestments - cope for Coventry
Cathedral.
1999. Hand painted with direct dye and discharge on
duchesse satin.
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It seems that few of the clergy or laity are aware of the theological potential of less restrictive design in vesture which might challenge age-old assumptions and enhance aspects of liturgical performance. Few have the inclination or indeed the courage to deviate from the restricted and restrictive liturgical seasonal colour code, guarded by preservers of tradition, but for which there is no hard and fast rule - only fashion! As Johnstone herself has to admit, Pope Innocent III, at the end of the 12th century, established in the Roman Church a canon of colour but 'it was by no means universally adopted. Even Innocent could only enforce his wishes in Rome'.5 Surely it ought to be possible for churches to envisage the use of non-traditional colour in expressing concepts such as penitence, spirit, incarnation, resurrection or salvation?
Styles of liturgy have evolved over the centuries, including recent times. The Second Vatican Council brought radical change to Roman Catholic liturgies in the mid-20th century and already in this new century there has been the introduction of Common Worship in the Church of England. Yet, despite these dramatic changes, many churches remain unable to recognise how inapt the use of dingy, deteriorating vestments is to the aesthetic atmosphere for worship. Dorothy Sayers' statement of 1949 continues today to ring too true, too often:
In her buildings, in her own ecclesiastical art and music, in her hymns and prayers, in her sermons and in her little books of devotion, the Church will tolerate, or permit a pious intention to excuse work so ugly, so pretentious, so tawdry and twaddling, so insincere and insipid, so bad (sic) as to shock and horrify any decent draftsman. 6
Alice
Kettle: Advent/Lent altar cloth, Gloucester Cathedral.
2001. Machine embroidery. Metal, cotton and rayon
threads. 100 x 385 x 107 cm.
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The Church must not take all the blame, however. Textile artists themselves are insufficiently challenging to the Church's assumptions regarding vestments and hangings. There is a tendency on the part of the artist to be over-respectful of the Church and the clergy. This can result in vestment design that, through either ignorance or conservatism on the part of the clergy, adheres to the repetition of conventional motif, albeit executed in contemporary embroidery techniques, rather than exploring the deep theological issues in a non-pictorial manner. Could not, for example, works such as Helen Parrot's quilt 'Surface Intervention IV', see Embroidery, November 2002, p. 25, or Jilly Edwards' weaving 'A Fine Line Between', Embroidery, July 2002, p. 36 or Jeanette Appleton's felt work 'The Sown and Un-Sown Land', Embroidery, July 2001, p. 208, given a church context, be perceived as an expression of the intervention of the extraordinary in the ordinary? Could such metaphorical openness to interpretation not be seen as keeping the viewer alert as well as keeping the work itself alive?
Textile artists, however, are generally bred through colleges of art. Could it not be then, that some of the fault lies with art education? Ecclesiastical design, it seems, has all but disappeared from this context. Where there is any residual interest in church work, it is often restricted to metal thread technique, which, even at its most exploratory, conforms to well-documented religious symbolism, thus contravening the principles of open-ended thinking and the development of ideas. Could it be that the reluctance on the part of these institutions to tackle ecclesiastical design arises from the fact that most people no longer engage with organised religion, and again are either too wary of its principles or are simply unaware of the potential waiting to be tapped?
Rozanne
Hawkesley: Mitre for First Sunday in Lent: '... then
was Jesus taken up to be tempted'.
1995. Moire silk/satin, lace, painted bone, hand-stitching
& jewels.
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To what extent is familiarity with Church dogma a prerequisite for engaging with spiritual issues? Could an acquisition of the principles of denominational teaching not be seen as part of the preparatory research for a commission? Is it entirely necessary, for example, to be a Jew to be able to engage with the Holocaust? Is it necessary for an artist to be a confessed, church-going Christian in order to engage with the anguish of physical abuse, torture and death? Given the current political climate, is it not possible to encounter through the media examples of horrors equivalent to the crucifixion of Jesus occurring in the 21st century on an almost daily basis? Again, Sayers' astonishingly frank criticism of the official Church for forgetting that 'secular work is sacred' holds fast. The Church, she writes:
Wastes time and energy, and moreover, commits sacrilege, in demanding that secular workers should neglect their proper vocation in order to do Christian work - by which She [the Church] means ecclesiastical work. The only Christian work is good work well done ... whether it is Church embroidery or sewage farming. 7
Given this state of affairs in the Church with regard to textile art, where do we go from here?
Clearly, textile artists, whether belonging to the Church or not, need to have the courage to challenge and to educate the clergy and laity in the same way that painters, sculptors and stained glass artists are doing. There is also a need for the dialogue between the textile artist and the commissioning Church to be one of equals, each party alert to the sensitivities of the other but not afraid of them.
Dialogue might also be usefully opened up at root level within theological colleges, though it is recognised that there are already too many demands upon ordinands. Any serious work between the textile world and the clergy might be more efficacious within programmes of continuing ministerial education provided by the dioceses alongside a more general art education such as that to which some bishops have been exposed.
Rozanne
Hawkesley: Mitre for First Sunday in Lent: '... then
was Jesus taken up to be tempted' - detail.
1995. Moire silk/satin, lace, painted bone, hand-stitching
& jewels.
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In the postscript to her book, Johnstone gives guarded praise to work in the 20th century, where she recognises 'a strong interest in the expression of symbolic meanings, not so much in the use of traditional symbols … but in wider concepts'. It is her personal opinion that 'occasionally this tendency is less than successful, in that the artist's intention cannot be read by an outsider without some explanation'. 8 Perhaps the reason for this 'obscurity' in symbolic design is the result of what Fr Jerome Bertram, writer of the Foreword to this book, sees as the (unspecified) 'strange things [which] have been happening in the church' for which an equilibrium has not been found in the 20th century.
But, is equilibrium what is needed? Do we live, in the Church, in a pseudo-medieval world where every detail needs to be spelled out by an informed hierarchy, leaving little, if any space for individual contribution to the spiritual quest? Should the challenge not be for the 21st century, at least in part, the celebration of the plurivocal, of newness, difference and change? If such celebration is filtering into some areas of the church then surely it is for those in control of art in our churches, in partnership with the vestment maker, to 'live dangerously' and from time to time at least, risk the challenge of the unprescribed, open-ended metaphor. Vestment design might then no longer be deemed 'the poor relation' but instead regain its status of 'high fashion' in the Church.
Colour and Stitch in the Church, curated by Jane Lemon with the Royal School of Needlework, including major pieces from principal cathedrals in Britain, can be seen at the Knitting and Stitching Shows:
9-12 October, Alexandra Palace, London
30 October-2 November, RDS, Dublin
20-23 November, International Halls, Harrogate.
Judith Peacock designs and makes ecclesiastical vesture to commission under the name Guyllstone Vestments. Having completed City and Guilds in Lancaster and Windsor, she went on to graduate with a BA in Art for Community and subsequently gained her PhD in Art and Theology at the University of Surrey, Roehampton.
This article is from Embroidery, Volume 54 No.4, © Judith Peacock