Embroiderers – many making a distinctly contemporary use of their skills – came from across the region when the Marlborough & District Embroiderers Guild hosted the South West Regional Festival at St John’s Academy on Saturday (May 18). Over two hundred members and guests attended – representing eighteen local Guilds.
Cas Holmes gave the Madeira sponsored lecture on Urban Nature. Her work relates to the natural and built world and uses found materials, domestic fabrics and gathered objects. We saw slides of her installations and she explained the inspiration behind them and their construction. She was also promoting her new book Connected Cloth.
In the afternoon, Patricia Godwin from the Palm Court Theatre gave a talk entitled Anything Goes. She entertained us with her tales – from Edwardian elegance to the roaring 20’s.
She has collected clothes from these periods together with newspapers and periodicals. As each garment was displayed she read snippets from these papers relating to those who would have worn them.
One of the Festival’s highlights was an exhibition by Year Ten textile students at St John’s put on by head tutor of textiles, Katie Griffin. The project was organised especially for this Festival Day.
Students took digital photos around the school and these images were then printed onto calico and then stitched into designs. The organisers declared the results to be ‘amazing’.
Festival guest Jane Lemon, an embroiderer with an international reputation who has created altar frontals for Salisbury Cathedral, viewed the students’ work and was delighted with what they were achieving.
The main competition of the day was for embroidery on the theme of ‘Superstition’. It was won by Lindsey Sherwood of the Marlborough Guild with her striking piece ‘Red Sky at Night’.
There was an exhibition of quilts from Urchfont Manor College. The present owner gave them to the Marlborough & District Guild and its chairman, Yvonne Miles, thought it was appropriate for them to be displayed as many of the members at the Festival had attended courses at the Manor.
Urchfont Manor College was a residential education college set up by Wiltshire Council in 1946. It was closed and sold earlier this year as part of the Council’s cuts.
Details of the regular meetings of the Marlborough and District Embroiderers Guild appear in our What’s On calendar.
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