The Biggest TV Quilt Ever
Back in the Autumn, I read with particular Liverpudlian interest that a new enterprise was kindling at Hawarden, the 18th century castle inherited by William Ewart Gladstone via his wife Catherine Glynne, just over the Cheshire border in North Wales. I learned that Charlie Gladstone (a descendant of the Victorian Prime Minister), his wife Caroline and the Welsh designer Sarah Hellen were launching a new range of British-made clothing and homewares from the design studio on the Hawarden Estate. I got in touch to ask if they might consider quilts, and to my delight, Sarah Hellen got straight back to tell me about the stash of offcuts she’d been hoarding for exactly that purpose.
I started to think about design, prompted by Hellen’s mention of the famous Wrexham Tailor’s Quilt, a virtuosic mash-up of geometry and Old Testament illustration in the collection of the National Museum of Wales. What grew in my sketchbook was a scruffy interpretation of similar geometrical adjacencies that had what I perceived as a pleasingly 1980s look; a touch of The Face, if you will. In the meantime Charlie, Caroline and Sarah, persuaded that a TV Quilt would be a great prop for their next shoot, named their leitmotif: LET’S GO COUNTRY.
A box of said offcuts arrived in the post and I set to confecting a 3.5m, 16-character (with spaces and apostrophe) TV Quilt: big enough to envelop the Gladstone/Hellen creative team plus dogs. I’m grateful for the permission to show some of the marvellous photography they commissioned here; by Daisy Wingate-Saul at my studio in South London, and by Fran Mart and Joya Berrow on the hillsides of Scotland and Wales.
