The Big Tulip
Mere days before leaving London for our residency in the Himalayas, Ned and I finally made it down to the V&A to see The Great Mughals. Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan were the Mughal emperors great in their patronage of artists and craftsmen brought south from Iran to furnish the imperial courts with architecture, décor and horticulture. In the Akbar and Jahangir galleries I took notes on motifs and colour and became preoccupied by the cut of the ‘Jama’, the frock coat worn at court, with its tight, high, side-buttoning bodice, full gathered skirt to the knee and – most intriguingly to me – absent shoulder seam, a structural feature that permitted the stripes of a striped coat to circle the arm laterally, rather than the length of the arm. Surely a gusset in the armpit, I mused, wondering if I could find a tailor in Delhi to make me one.
Epiphany struck in the final room devoted to Shah Jehan, the third of the ‘great’ emperors, famous for commissioning the Taj Mahal as the mausoleum of his wife. On and off I’d been studying Iznik models and thinking about a tulip; I mean how I might construct one out of inserted patchwork, and the answer stared at me from a plinth in the darkened hall. There it was, a meenakari cup and plate from the court of Shah Jahan in 1640, unmistakeable and iconic in its tulip-ness and yet wildly, thrillingly asymmetric, with that third petal flung out to the right.
With the Big Mango quilting underway, I drew the pattern pieces for my second Spacehouse quilt at 1:1 scale on the wall of my studio. A dozen pieces, some of them improbably skinny, pieced in strict sequence to afford continuous curves of maximum sinuosity. I tried to intensify this by hand quilting in parabolic curves, rather than the concentric parallels I’d established for the mango. The evolved version of the pattern has stripes in the left and right petals, but for the time being I inflamed them by stitching densely in yellow, rather than my usual off-white. To evoke the corrals of gold that contain enamel colours in meenakari technique, I finished by embroidering the seams in gold chain stitch.
It feels like a breakthrough to make something figurative and antique in its lineage, but I know it was the asymmetry that got my Bauhaus sensibility.
Big Tulip quilt patchworked in linen and Chanderi cotton-silk; hand quilted and embroidered; bound with striped gold silk; 150 x 200cm.
Cup, cover and salver
Mughal court workshops; about 1640-50
Meenakari (enamelled gold)
The al-Sabbah Collection, Dar al-Athar al-Islamayyah
I am grateful to our North Essex friends for the Tudor location; contemporaneous enough with the great Mughal courts.