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.