A Meander down on Baker Street
New bespoke Meander in the colours of five London Underground lines.
Last year I was asked to make a quilt by someone who had just bought an elegant flat on Baker Street. Chiltern Court was designed by Charles Walter Clark for the Metropolitan Railway and built in 1929. In his architectural guide to North West London, Pevsner described it as “a stately classical pile”. Today Transport for London remains the freeholder and London’s oldest Tube station occupies the ground and nether floors.
My client wanted a piece for the drawing room wall that would complement the 1930s, slightly municipal elegance of the environment. His genius idea was to have it patchworked in the colours of the five Underground lines that intersect in the station below: Bakerloo, Metropolitan, Circle, Hammersmith & City and Jubilee. We chose the Meander design which, without being literal (and without Harry Beck’s 45° angles) suggests a transport map.
I set about sourcing linens, a task made simpler by my delighted discovery that TFL’s colour guidelines are a public document published online. Hammersmith & City pink was a tricky match, but the Cloth House turned up trumps with their magnificent array of Khadi cottons, containing a cold, sugared pink with a slubby texture that complemented the Irish and Baltic linens. We agreed that a bronze silk frame could subtly evoke old-style railway station hardware.
The quilt and its owner look down on the above-ground tracks of the Metropolitan Line. With the distant rumble of trains arriving and leaving below, and intermittent reminders to mind the gap, it’s the height of urban romance.
A-basking in Colour and Form
Pemberton's debut collection for Abask UK launches as Autumn chills the air
The online luxury retailer Abask UK has launched a début collection of Pemberton quilts.
Abask is the second retail enterprise from investor Tom Chapman, who, with his wife Ruth, started Matches Fashion in 1987, valued 30 years later at $1 billion and acquired by Apex Partners. In 2022 Chapman, and MatchesFashion e-commerce director Nicholas Pickaerts, founded Abask, with the ambition to offer a curated range of vintage and contemporary objects for the home that had origin, meaning and “soul”. Along with a stable of antiques experts, Abask recruited Bryony Sheridan, former head buyer at Liberty, to identify and work with a careful selection of international makers and keep an unwavering eye on design and craftsmanship.
Sheridan and her colleague Connah Lamb invited Pemberton to propose designs in the ‘Modernist’ and ‘Bohemian’ zones, two of their four style categories (along with ‘Minimal’ and ‘Classical”). We settled on six designs, including a brand new design, Tefnut, inspired by the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for water and named for its goddess; and Quad, released for the first time as a machine quilt. Abask is offering these designs in three exclusive colourways. Kuba recalls the colours of traditional Congolese raffia appliqué known as “Kuba cloth”, with a mid-century-modern feel and a red that pops. Alhambra is the three colours of the wall tiles all over the Moorish palace in Granada, grounded with black and white. Carnival is bright, joyful blend of fairground carousel, gypsy caravan and Pakistani painted truck art.
Modernist, for sure, in inspiration; Bohemian, definitely, by virtue of the essentially heterogenous character of patchwork. I’ll take those epithets.
Curllusion, an arrangement of intersecting ovoid shapes and perpendicular lines inspired by a ceramic milk pitcher
Tefnut is named after the ancient Egyptian goddess of water; this flat zig-zag was inspired by the hieroglyph for water.
Fragments, fifteen shards of colour each in its own variegated neutral field
The Shoeman's Puzzle is a traditional patchwork pattern constructed from 4 triangles that multiply and combine with an Op-Art dynamism. Consistent seam allowances are the way to get sharply intersecting points.
Quad, a composition of rectangles inspired by 1960s relief artworks, that uses occlusion and colour variegation to muddle fugure and ground.
Meander, a continuous line in a neutral field, inspired by a drawing by Anni Albers, herself inspired by 13 trips to Mexico; and following the rules of her pattern which correspond with the labyrinth designs traditional to Mayan art.
All six designs are exclusively available to purchase from Abask.com.
Quilts on Stage
Meander as the formidable Labyrinth at Knossos.
To win back his beloved Ariadne and release Athens from its bonds, prince Theseus must enter King Minos’s formidable labyrinth at Knossos and slay the Minotaur – half man-half bull – imprisoned within.
Handel’s Arianna in Creta was firt performed in London in 1734. Stephen Taylor, Director of the 2024 production for Innsbruck Festival der Alten Music, requested my Meander hand quilt as a feature in the stage design, to represent the labyrinth; itself an eternal and universal symbol of life’s puzzles and choices. Ariadne’s red thread becomes Theseus’s redemptive cypher, leading him back to the world.
Meander was inspired by Anni Albers’s Red Meander weaving of 1954. Anni and her husband, Josef, having fled Nazi Germany and found themselves among progressive artists and emigrés at Black Mountain College in the United States, became engrossed by pre-Columbian crafts as containing the seeds of modern abstraction. The artisanal experience of moulding – and, to Anne’s mind in particular, weaving – material and spirit into plastic form became a driving preoccupation. While the labyrinth itself – the maze – appears across pre-historic continents as a figure, Anni’s has the Mayan look (and I believe she made thirteen trips to Mexico). I studied the rules of her pattern – a single meandering line, figure and ground strictly equal in weight – and contrived my own in 10cm square units.
Above: Il Sonno (Morpheus, the god of sleep) visits Teseo on the eve of his mission, with premonitions of slaughter and redemption,. Photos by Birgit Gufler.
Meander, 2019; linen and cotton patchwork, hand quilted and bound with silk; 240 x 200cm.
Allez les Bleus! Part II
Three new hand quilts on display for London Craft Week at Connolly gallery
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.
Quad, 2024
Penta, 2024
Perpendot, 2024
Fissure, 2019
Allez les Bleus! Part I
Catching the indigo mood for Connolly Spring Summer 2024
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
In homage to ‘Mama’ Cass Elliot and all the world’s other nightime benedictions
“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?
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
The first contemporary design interventions at David Parr House.
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 quilt selected for a prestigious listing in excellent company
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
TRULOVE and RAKEWELL: a companion pair of TV Quilts inspired by Hogarth and Hockney
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.
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
Three T.V. quilts commissioned by Anya Hindmarch to celebrate sisterhood at the concept store in Chelsea.
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
Elusive figures wrapped in colour and shape and stitching repose in mysterious pools of black.
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.
