A 6-part Gardens Trust online lecture series, exploring how flowers and gardens have inspired textile artists, begins Mondays at 18:00 BST, equivalent to 2 pm Eastern time. Here in their latest series of talks they are taking a sideways view by exploring how gardens and flowers have influenced and inspired other arts and crafts. This first series of 6 will focus on textiles and explore some of the historical and technical aspects of embroidering, weaving and printing using floral designs on fabric. You will look at textiles from Elizabethan crowns to Edwardian table linen to see how flowers provided inspiration, taking in the prolific art embroiderers of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Then you will be brought bang up to date with two contemporary embroiderers with very different approaches to floral imagery who will share their design processes with us.
The first talk on September 19 is The Broderer’s Crown, with Cynthia Jackson. Following the reformation, embroiderers in the Tudor era increasingly embraced the use of floral imagery to decorate a myriad of objects from ceremonial items to furnishings and fashionable garments. Luxury fabrics such as silk velvet and cloth woven with silver tinsel were embellished with botanical imagery gleaned from popular illustrated herbals. La Clef des Champs provided patterns inspired by Jacques Le Moyne’s exquisite watercolour representations of life in a Tudor garden. Skilled hands created beautiful embroideries using polychrome silks and gold and silver threads in a variety of techniques.
Three exceptional extant Tudor embroideries illustrate the remarkable creativity of the Tudor embroiderer. The textile known as the Bacton Altar Cloth is like a garden, a sampling of a wide range of colourful, botanical sprigs arranged in rows, alive with insects flitting through the blooms. In the early tradition of the popular miniature, a small and exquisitely embroidered portrait of a fashionable Tudor lady is featured in front of a formal garden, complete with topiary and fountain. The Broderer’s Crown is a ceremonial artifact used to inaugurate a newly elected official of the 16th century Livery Company. It is unique in its decoration of applied silk and metal flowers on a circlet of silk velvet. The overall design is a simple repeat but as the individual layers of flowers and fruit are explored, the embroidery on the Crown reveals an astonishing complexity.
This ticket (click HERE) is for this individual session and costs £5, and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire course of 6 sessions at a cost of £24 via the link here.
Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk. A link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards.
Cynthia Jackson is a freelance embroiderer, designer and tutor. An award-winning textile artist, she finds inspiration in the remarkable potential of embroidery, experimenting with the unusual while preserving a commitment to technique. Cynthia’s focus, as an independent academic researcher, is on professional Tudor embroiderers and the impact of their craft on the material culture of early modern England. Her published articles combine documentary analysis with careful practical investigation of 16th century artifacts. She is a two-time recipient of the Society of Antiquaries of London’s Janet Arnold Award. Her current goal is to seek out, examine and re-create extant examples of 16th English embroidery, culminating in the publication of an illustrated history of Tudor embroidery and a practical guide to techniques and materials.
