Tanya Bentham Talk
Yesterday we had a real treat when Tanya Bentham came to give us a talk about her work. Packed into her car and unloaded for display were two trolley loads of bags and boxes plus a few extras! She covered four tables and two double sided hanging rails with beautiful stitched pieces. I think it's the most we've ever had at a talk and my goodness it was all fabulous. Tanya researched medieval embroidery and started producing the lovely work we saw. The Bayeux tapestry has a lot of open area with no stitch, but medieval laid and couched work fills the base fabric. This red piece is based on an Icelandic design and used as an altar frontal. Tanya loves using natural dyed wool in her pieces with the limited colour palette available to medieval embroiderers. The eight or nine colours feature in all the parts of the panel making the piece coherent. The medieval pieces have a cartoonish quality, no worries if you can't do anatomically correct animals! People at the time were able...
