Allez les Bleus! Part II

Three new hand quilt designs, Quad, Penta and Perpendot, are on display for London Craft Week in the gallery at Connolly in Mayfair.

Quad takes inspiration from 1960s relief artworks, in particular the work of the British artist Victor Passmore. The design is a rhythmic arrangement of rectangles which uses occlusion and colour variegation to muddle figure and ground; densely quilted in quadratic spirals.

Penta was prompted by my stumbling upon a photo of the lobby floor tiles devised by Marjorie Rice at the Mathematical Association of America a few years ago while researching a talk on pattern for a group of year 11 school students. While I was vaguely aware that you cannot tesselate (that is, join together without gaps or overlaps) a regular pentagon, this discovery introduced me to the tessellation of irregular pentagons. My design is number 3 of the 15 irregular pentagons known to tesselate. No mystery how – three of them form the hexagon that we recognise from traditional patchwork – but I love how the pattern is veiled by a baroque appearance of asymmetry. This one is quilted in a loose pentagonal latticework.

The third design, Perpendot, is an enlarged detail from an improvised quilt from about five years ago, with sections re-improvised in the Connolly indigo stuffs. It is quilted to echo the circle, square and triangle – elemental units gone awry – of which the design is composed.

Fissure (2019) is also on display – a big ‘crazy’ quilt improvised in a variety of blues including cotton, linen, silk and velvet.

The exhibition Indigo is open from 10–18 May in the first floor gallery at Connolly, 4 Clifford Street, London W1. The quilts are for sale by Connolly.

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Quad, 2024

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Penta, 2024

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Perpendot, 2024

Fissure, 2019

Allez les Bleus! Part I

Pemberton and Connolly have collaborated on a collection of indigo-based quilts to complement the Spring Summer ’24 fashion collection.

In shades of blue from workwear to cobalt, cerulean to ink, the quilts take inspiration from a special quadratic print that was the nucleus of the collection. QUAD 101 evokes the print straight-up, Quad 360 rotates the basic unit four times. Each quilt in these two designs is subtly different by virtue of a degree of improvisation.

Connolly, founded in 1878, became known around the world in the 20th century for leather upholstery supplied to the luxury British automobile industry. Later – and having diversified into seating, luggage and leather accessories – the brand was transformed by Isabel Ettedgui into a retail concept expressing all Connolly’s history of craftsmanship in fashion, accessories and an eclectic range of new and vintage objets. Part of this rebirth was the refurbishment of an exquisite eighteenth century townhouse in Mayfair in which Connolly has made its 21st century home.

Ten indigo linens and cottons – including handloom Khadi, hand-dyed, antique French damask, and Connolly’s own cotton-silk printed voile – are patchworked in a neutral field of broken white into a quartet of one-of-a-kind quilts. They are available exclusively from Connolly both online and in the beautiful Mayfair shop from 10 May 2024.

Three new hand quilt designs will be on display for London Craft week in the first floor gallery: see Part II later this week.

A California Evensong

“Defend us from all perils and dangers of this night” used to startle me in the Evensong service, and when I started making quilts it struck me as a good phrase to sleep under. Written in the days of unlit streets and alleyways, when it wasn’t uncommon for a fever to steal away a soul during the night, its meaning was renewed by the global Covid 19 pandemic, when I made the first Evensong quilt.

A plea not just for repose, comfort and the stillness of evening, but for a protective shield against assault, despair and disease until the break of day. All faiths surely have such a prayer, and the same benediction finds its secular way into poetry, popular song and proverbial wisdom. Dream a Little Dream of Me, written by Wilbur Schwandt, Fabian Andre and Gus Khan, was first recorded in 1931 but made famous in 1968 by the unmistakably sweet-and-gravelly voice of ‘Mama’ Cass Elliot. 

The latest Evensong quilt, is patchworked in Haight-Ashbury thrift-shop colours subtly legible against a field of linen, chambray and vintage denim. Festively bound striped Indian viscose sateen, it is hand-quilted in close to 300m of golden yellow thread.

To my ear, “Sweet dreams ‘til sunbeams find you” has a metaphysical nerve worthy of John Donne’s “busy old fool”. That is, not until you see the sun rise, but until its beams come and get you. 

SWEET DREAMS patchwork hand quilt in linen, cotton and viscose; 200 x 200cm.

The Full Character Set

An anniversary commission from a classmate at Yale School of Art was the prompt to extend my patchwork alphabet into a set of numerals. And then, hell, why not the full character set? 

When I designed the original alphabet in 2019 in order to make Evensong 1 (DEFEND US FROM ALL PERILS AND DANGERS OF THIS NIGHT), I had in the back of my mind Joseph Albers’s modular Kombinationsschrift of 1928 with its distinctive rounded corners. As graduates of Yale, where Albers was Director of Design (encompassing Fine Art and Architecture) from 1970 onwards after his years at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, Juliette and I are direct inheritors of Albers’s great teaching. 

And since my patchwork alphabet was to be all caps – a ‘display face’ in the language of the trade – there's always a whiff of Russian Constructivist typography. The original cap height of 285mm was great for TV quilts but, looking for a sample of Victorian poetry for David Parr House, I realised the size was a severe editorial restriction: good for a banner in a public space; a bit shouty on the bed. I shrank my new set of templates by about 80% to a cap height of 225mm. 

This quilt marks a 25th wedding anniversary in 18 of her husband’s shirts. Now, how about your favourite atomic number on a TV Quilt? The Golden Ratio to the nearest of 0.000001? Or just the day that brought the greatest blessing of your life?

Anniversary machine quilt; linen and vintage cotton; 225 x 225cm

A Victorian evensong in Cambridge

I am pleased to be among the textile artists invited to make a series of contemporary interventions in David Parr House.

My quilt, NOW FOLDS THE LILY, which adorns the master bedroom of the house, is the most recent in the EVENSONG collection of typographic quilts evoking the stillness and hush of the night. It was prompted by the scripts that David Parr incorporated into his designs, and by the colours of Victorian painting and décor. The text is from a popular poem about evening by the Victorian Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, which opens with the line “Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white". 

The House is an extraordinary testament to the career of a Victorian man, David Parr, who was apprenticed from the workhouse to a large Cambridge decorating firm which dispatched its artisans to apply the designs of William Morris et al to grand houses all over the country. Having risen to become a master-painter, Parr spent his nights and weekends applying his skills to the walls and ceilings of the two-up, two-down row house he had purchased for his family in the 1870s. Upon the death of his granddaughter in the first decade of our century, many of the designs were discovered to be intact, and the house preserved as a museum https://davidparrhouse.org.

The other House Guests are Fiona Curran, Shelly Goldsmith, Tanvi Kant, Richard McVetis, Rachael Matthews, Beatrice Mayfield  and Anya Paintsil.

NOW FOLDS THE LILY 2023 Linen, cotton and silk patchwork quilt, machine pieced and hand quilted; 200 x 200cm

See here for the Evensong collection in development.

House & Garden Design 100

Curllusion, a quilt I designed for my collaboration with PINCH for London Craft Week, has been selected for the 2023 H&G Design 100, featuring under the banner “Material studies” among designers “pushing the possibilities [of textiles and paper] with repurposed materials and bold forms”.

In very good company.

Curllusion is available under machine quilts here, and also to order in a bespoke, hand-quilted version here via Helen Chislett Gallery.

The Rake’s Progress

RAKEWELL and TRULOVE are a companion pair of TV Quilts inspired by Hogarth and Hockney.

The Rake’s Progress opera was written by Igor Stravinsky with a libretto by WH Auden and Chester Kallman; and first performed in 1951. Glyndebourne commissioned set designs by David Hockney for the iconic 1975 production; revived in the Glyndebourne Festival 2023.

William Hogarth told the parable of Tom Rakewell’s decline from inherited fortune to the madhouse in eight paintings depicting the vice and dissolution of early 18th century London. In the libretto, Tom’s long-suffering betrothed, Sarah Young, is renamed Anne Trulove, faithful to the last. David Hockney took inspiration from the paintings and also from the engravings that Hogarth made later as a subscription enterprise: the set designs are crosshatched in a combination of monochrome and bright Biro colours.

In these quilts, he stands onstage in rakish red and murky backroom browns, she in the fresh spring colours of youth and hope and true love, both surrounded by monochrome drapes and Regency swags.

I am grateful to Merchant & Mills Ltd., Rye, for their generous supply of checked and striped linen.

Main photo and centre below by Angela Moore

Pemberton at PINCH for London Craft Week

Russell and Oona Pinch hosted Pemberton for London Craft Week 2023 in their Ebury Street shop at the heart of the Pimlico Road interiors quarter.

To mark this exciting collaboration, Emily’s new quilt design, Curllusion, is a composition of intersecting ovoid shapes and perpendicular seams inspired by a ceramic milk pitcher in the PINCH collection. Four colourways produced for the event draw on the PINCH palette of timber, upholstery velvets, plant fibre and ceramic glaze.

Curllusion, shown alongside a dozen other hand and machine quilts, enhanced the PINCH furniture and lighting collection with a textural dimension and an artistic richness.

Portrait with Russell Pinch and Curllusion by James Merrell.

Anya Hindmarch: It Takes a Village

Anya Hindmarch partnered with the WI to bring It Takes A Village to Pont Street, Chelsea, in a concept store celebrating women and craft. It featured three of my TV Quilts, commissioned exclusively for the event, co-branded with Anya Hindmarch, and bearing the words SISTER, MOTHER and FRIEND. Displayed along with a dozen large format Pemberton quilts, this language of sisterhood chimed with the exhibition of vintage WI banners and a new collection of ‘Protest Pouches’, hand-stitched with slogans and messages by individual makers and members of the WI.

Angela Moore pictures

I gave Angela Moore a brief with two requirements. First, to emphasise the bold, graphic quality that distinguishes my quilts. Second, to express their enveloping properties of comfort and protection. We agreed to shoot them on the body, revealing little beyond hair, hands and feet. Angela built a set in which elusive figures wrapped in colour and shape and stitching would repose in mysterious pools of black.