A stitch in time – the Quaker Tapestry

The Quakers have found a wonderful and idiosyncratic way of telling their story and explaining their beliefs, through a tapestry.

They are known for their  rejection of violence and an egalitarian approach to religion, having no priests or bishops, so their tapestry is a counterpoint to the only other similar work that is widely known, the Bayeux Tapestry, which tells the story of the Norman invasion of England.

But this old technique is also modern. The idea started  in 1981 with a remark from an eleven year old boy in the South West of England to his teacher, Ann Wynn-Wilson, an accomplished embroiderer, who imagined a series of panels covering Quaker history and beliefs.

Situated in Kendal, at the Friends Meeting House, a listed Georgian building, the tapestry consists of 77 panels, just over 60 x 50cm, embroidered on a woven wool cloth. By the project's completion in 1996 over 4,000 people, including children from 15 countries had contributed to the 77 panels, an international, communal effort.

Although so many people contributed, there is a common theme and appearance to all panels. All have a simple theme, such as a prominent person,  often with a quotation, Quaker contribution to science, the slave trade, banking and so on.

The time and skill taken over each panel is obvious, invoking the use of icons in other faiths and the visitor is given the impression of a faith that may not be well known having made a tremendous contribution in so many areas. Elizabeth Fry, the great prison reformer, the Cadbury and Rountree families who added a social conscience to the industrial age, with schools,libraries, retirement homes and even homes with gardens.

It is sobering to recall that workers in Quaker owned businesses often had better conditions 150 years ago than many workers today. Likewise, who could look at the panels on banking and bankers and not feel that the world would be a radically better place if Quakers were put in charge of the financial sector?

Service to others is another thread running through the exhibition, especially with relief work and the Friends Ambulance Service and the Nobel Peace Prize, which was accepted with humility.

These noble principles and sacrifices were not always recognised, there has been widespread persecution of Quakers and many panels tell the story of their martyrs, those imprisoned and tortured.

Not all panels are on display, there are always some exhibited elsewhere, and this reflects another part of the Quaker approach. This is not a series to be cast in stone, but an ever changing, living document, and it is one that speaks through the ages in a way that not only leaves viewers appreciating the extraordinary levels of skill, but also moved by the clarity and simplicity of the message from these tapestries.

There is a short film about the tapestry at the entrance to the exhibition, a fascinating introduction. tucked in, at the back of the exhibition is another film about the Quakers, that you can watch from the traditional wooden benches.

Don't forget to take a look inside the Meeting Room, where the Friends gather three times a week for worship, the chairs set out in a circle in a sparsely decorated room, apart from a lovely wooden bookcase, whose library shows the diversity of views and interests people find inspiration in, and before leaving, try the cafe, with gorgeous food at reasonable prices, it is just an extension of the values displayed on the tapestry.

Tough times for heirs to Ruskin and Wordsworth

The annual Summer showcase for the highest quality arts and crafts

Lakeland Arts and Crafts join together in the face of austerity.

The English Lake District is identified with William Wordsworth and John Ruskin. The former revolutionised poetry and began the ‘Romantic Movement’ and Ruskin, whose extraordinary mind crossed art, social reform and philosophy inspired Tolstoy, Proust and Gandhi, along with William Morris, whose Arts and Crafts movement is the thinker and critics legacy.

But what of the arts and crafts of Cumbria today?

They’re struggling, but have found the best way forward is by working together. The Lakes Collective is a growing group of artists and craft producers, have combined to support each other and the excellence of their cultural contributions. founded five years ago, they now have over 50 members.

At their Annual Summer Showcase at Rydal Hall, where Wordsworth and friends found inspiration in the grounds, two of the group, Clare Humphry and Elizabeth Shorrock showed EU reporter around and explained their difficulties in keeping the creative spirit alive in these ancient hills.

Humphry explains their approach, “To put on exhibitions, we’re self-funded,so we all contribute to hiring a venue, and the other costs involved in putting on a show such as equipment and advertising, but whatever you sell, belongs to each artist.” It’s an approach that cuts down the costs, and enables to get the full amount of their sales.

“In galleries, you have commissions of 40, 50%, sometimes more,” says Shorrock, a former teacher now devoting her time to her creations.

“There are a lot of artists in Cumbria but a lot of the groups are for one discipline only. There are very few places where you can put together the arts and crafts with fine art, like we can,” says Shorrock, adding, “and of course, those who fit in between.”

People have to be an artist or a designer-maker, who design and create a finished work by themselves.” The criteria for membership is also quality, which can be hard to define, but the high standards are obvious to visitors.

Ruskin would approve, as he said, “When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.”

While the area is a world-class tourist destination, the artists are faced with innate prejudices against rural communities, “If we put on an exhibition in a little village hall, visitors think there can’t be anything too good in such a place,” says Humhpry, and sometimes they’re right as there are some who produce tat for tourists, not fine art.

There’s no snobbery in this, like most people in the area they are hard workers and soft talkers, merely wanting to create skilled works and the equally hard part, earn a living and this is where the geography that inspires can also be an obstacle.

Is it hard to make a living? The two look at each other and cheerily laugh. It’s almost impossible to make a living. Far away from the urban art scene, where the galleries and money is, it’s tough. Harder

when the Lake District economy is divided between wealthy owners who move into the area after having made their money elsewhere, when the locals are mostly on part time, seasonal, zero-hours contracts.

“There are artists working as cleaners in hotels and other low paid tourism jobs, doing all sorts of jobs just to get by,” says Humphry, “It gets worse when you get a bit older and you have partners, children and responsibilities grow.”

She adds: “It’s also hard to work full time and still produce art, you need time to think and develop ideas you have, you need that mental space to be creative.”

There is also the effect of the North-South divide, where it costs too much to bring an exhibition into London and there is the expectation that art from the North is, well cheaper. There are numerous anecdotes of reactions from some in the metropolitan art scene that demonstrates how those in northern, rural areas are looked down on.

But they are creative, more so when they work with others.

In one recent project was a collaboration with the Wordsworth Trust, based in the poet’s home, Dove Cottage.

The Rector of St Oswald’s church in Grasmere, where Wordsworth is buried, took a select group of poets around, some of them with international reputations, telling them all about the place, then they went off and wrote poems on the experience, then the artists were given the poems, anonymously and created an artwork inspired by them,” Shorrock explains. The poems will be published in the near future.

There are also some outstanding locations for artists to use, should they battle past the varied authorities, but one exciting event next May will be their installation of Alice in Wonderland by their collective in the Edwardian formal gardens of Rydal Hall, a perfect setting..

“I’ve got a steampunk Jabberwocky already!” exclaims Humphrys.

What they also have, is the spirit Ruskin and Wordsworth, who valued culture as the highest expression of society, but with increasingly deeper cuts to arts funding, the north of England is losing out to the city sophisticates and art teaching in steep decline, neither of the artists can think of an answer to ‘What is the future of arts and crafts in the Lake District?

They struggle on, with as much joy as they can muster. Let’s hope they can beat the odds, for to lose the creativity and cultural treasures the Lake District has given would be a disaster, not just to England, but Europe and the wider world.

A trip up memory lane

Before journalism, I worked for the National Trust, leading one of their footpath repair teams.

I went to Easedale Tarn in Grasmere and Stickle Ghyll, Langdale to look at some work I did some 30 years ago.



Here's a shot that shows the before and after, at Sour Milk Ghyll, restored some 25 years ago

Hidden homes, secret spaces

Wordsworth's 'Grot' at Rydal Hall nr Ambleside

There’s always been that childhood thrill of having a secret hideaway, perhaps it is why so many British males aspire to owning a garden shed but there are entire sub-cultures devoted to sheds and their US version, the man cave.

Rita Rudner once remarked, “Men don’t live very well by themselves. They don’t even live like people. They live like bears with furniture.”

While some poor fools matured as far as a man can, a debatable distance, there are still some who have gone all out on a hidden home.

William Wordsworth had ‘The Grot’. It is visited by following a path under a forbidding bridge just over head height, then a plain stone faced and humble building. Open the little wooden door and the opposite wall is one large window showing the previously hidden scene, a small waterfall and pool where the water rushes off the mountain and down to the lake a mile away

In this place, the poet gazed out at the scene of natural perfection and honed his sonnets. Naturally, there’s also tales of the other Lake poets – who brought Romanticism to the fore – having less noble uses of the hideaway and one only has to consider the lifestyles of Shelly, Byron, Coleridge and so on.

The poor little outhouse has probably seen more drug abuse and degradation than Keith Richard’s cleaner.

There are other secrets in the area, including a cave with a hidden door in one of the Lakeland hills, whose location was a highly guarded secret and it was so well hidden that even on return visits, finding the handle that operated the opening mechanism was far from easy.

More lofty, was the ambition of Gustave Eiffel, whose tower, it was discovered had a secret apartment built into it, just under 300m high, for the use of himself and his friends, such as Thomas Edison, who left a suitable gift, one of his new phonograph machines.

There are other stories, once rumours, such as the tale of secret tunnels under the Playboy mansion leading to film stars houses. Well, some old blueprints were found for designs leading to ‘Mr. J. Nicholson’, ‘Mr. K. Douglas’, ‘Mr. W. Beatty’ and ‘Mr. J Caan’.

A group of artists in Providence, Rhode Island were inspired by a local shopping mall’s adverts saying their place was so good, you’d want to live there, explain the artists, “The central theme of the ads was that the mall not only provided a rich shopping experience, but also had all the things that one would need to survive and lead a healthy life.”

However, they were inspired to create a home in the mall. They had watched the construction of the mall and noticed that a space used for storing materials used in the construction was not being used.

They spent time sneaking in 200 tons of materials and created a 750 square ft apartment, where they lived on and off for four years before one of them was caught leaving the illicit apartment. He pleaded guilty to trespass, but no harm seems to have been done.

The artist behind the project says he was trying to build an oasis and admits, “Yes, I have done other secret installations: The Tunnel.”

Other artists are using malls. In Las Vegas’ City Center mall, the Louis Vuitton hosts a permanent exhibit by James Turrell, whose use of light and Granzfeld effect – where distances can’t be judged, causing the brain to hallucinate.

So if home is where the heart is, can it also be where the art is.

Consider the Lily Tarn

Loughrigg may not be as well known or celebrated as the English Lake District's 'Big Three' mountains; Scafell, Helvellyn and Skiddaw, but it should not be under-appreciated.

Squatting at the Northern end of Lake Windermere, it has an undulating plateau of hollows, tarns and shiny streams.

It is an easy yet safe place to get lost on because you can, in good weather, take your bearings on the higher, distant fells in the knowledge that if you go in vaguely the right direction, it'll work out.

The ascent from Ambleside is very steep at the start, but after a lung cleaning hundred metres you take a left and it levels off before winding its way to one of the more famous views of Lake Windermere on a trio of rocky outcrops.

When I first arrived in the village a few decades ago I was living, well squatting to be honest, under this fell and it was on this rocky perch that the Lake District began to work its magic, just half an hour from the madding crowds pounding the tills of the multitude of cagoule shops below.

Back then, the kindest word to describe me would be 'lost'. I'd come through a series of misadventures that had turned darker and darker until I thought that something inside of me had died.

I'd paid a heavy price but had escaped with my life somehow, heading to the hills like a bandit fleeing a posse of nightmares.

But sitting on the rocks with birdsong in the air, there was a whisper from the void within me. "Here, this is the place," it said. I was too exhausted to ignore it, to explain it away, so I took to wandering up Loughrigg frequently.

If I couldn't seep, I went alone in the night, especially near a full moon, where there was enough light to climb a well known path.

The fiercest storms were a challenge, so I climbed in howling wind, when rain blasted my face and hurt and I danced like the madman I was in the hail and snow.

Over the months, from the end of Summer to the harsh Winter, something happened, something changed and it is only recently that I began to understand it.

After looking over the lake, the next stop was always Lily Tarn, set in a high hollow, one of nature's infinity pools with a small island near one bank where a solitary tree grew, braving the elements, safe from the chomping jaws of the herdwick sheep.

It was small tarn, roughly 25 metres in wide, but it felt far from anywhere, hanging on the edge, with the grander hills behind.

Yet, it was a place of stillness, helped by being in a natural windbreak. I visited in all its moods, when giant dragonflies darted around, when the midges came out, the smallest vampires.

And as the sun set one Winters' eve, I saw the stillness of the tarn seem to hold, to pause and edging to the waters' edge, little clear lines appeared, forked and fragmented across the surface.

A few minutes later, they faded and the water turned to ice as I watched, feeling the cold numbness spread to myself.

There are a million ways of looking at a mountain tarn. It takes time, but in the end you are rewarded if you learn to love the unfolding of its moods and colours as the seasons cycle past.

In the end, the fells gaze back into the visitor and it is this that transforms so many who love them: They tell you who you are.

If you are patient enough and humble before nature, something happens that recalls Neil DeGrasse Tyson's observation of the Apollo space program, "We went to the Moon and discovered Earth."

In the Lake District, you don't need to fly so high to make the longest journey, to find your heart and soul.