Sheffield Cathedral bids farewell to one of the largest ever textile projects by a single artist.
‘Threads Through Creation’ is the second textile instalment toured by Jacqui Parkinson. Her 12 cloth panels are scheduled to tour through seven cathedrals around England, stopping next in Blackburn.
Her work is meant to be a retelling of ‘God’s Creation’, with its unique quality of racial diversity in some of her panels, especially in the Adam and Eve depiction. Mrs Parkinson said: “If you look at renaissance art, then you’ll see there’s a lot of stereotyped images of everything, so my idea was just that we live in a world and we don’t know what they looked like.”
The choice to have the exhibition be shown in cathedrals was primarily a space issue, seeing as her project required a large venue, but besides the religious themes in her artwork she found the artistic nature in these old buildings to compliment her collection.
She said: “If you look at stained glass with all the colour and its black lines, it’s telling a story. There’s a great resonance between the stained glass windows and my work.”
This exhibition is the second project that she has toured in the UK, the first being ‘Threads Through Revelation’, which visited 14 cathedrals from 2016 to 2018.
Although the work is tedious, her passion keeps her motivated. She said: “I’m not very patient, I just have to have tenacity. I like the creative side of these projects, and of course what else would I be doing?
“I spent a lot of time looking at the story, trying to work out what images I want to look at in detail, but I liked to put symbolism there for people who just like that sort of thing like me. I just enjoy playing with ideas as well as playing with images.”
The volunteers at Sheffield Cathedral expressed that they were sad to see it leaving soon, but they are happy that it was such a popular event.
