Beryl Dean: Festal frontal
Title: Festal frontal
Artist: Bery Dean (1911–2001)
Location: Kings Lynn Minster (C of E)
Date: 1965
Nominated by Laura Moffatt, director of A+C: ‘The east wall and window of King’s Lynn Minster is a composition of height and grandeur, rising from the five wide steps to the high altar to G. F. Bodley’s gold leaf on painted reredos and panelling, and a tight-knit array of figures in the crowning rose window. Amid this proliferation of decorative schemes, Beryl Dean’s frontal – she made three: white, red and purple – hunkers down at the centre of it all. Her board-mounted embroideries have the autonomy and visual sophistication of a skilled panoramic painting, and yet they are securely site-specific. In Dean’s Festal Frontal (1965), on an off-white silk background, the exact placement of symbolic motifs fills the space in a joyous and rhythmic assembly, some in hefty dark brown or black Lurex which both draw the eye in and send it out again. Crosses of silver, gold, brown and white are encrusted in beads or sequins, sometimes haloed by gold braid. Between their interlocking forms, a background of vertical appliqué and machine-work ‘shading’ elevates their three-dimensional appearance and sets up the tension between verticality and the outstretched horizontals of each cross.
Eschewing symmetry in each of the frontals, Dean creates a humane and paradoxically centred presence at which the Eucharist is celebrated. Left of centre in the Festal Frontal, bullrushes (a symbol of faith and trust) are arranged into a cross formation and next to it a vivid red is suggestive of the blood of Christ. In each motif, the cross – shorthand for Christ’s death and resurrection – carries energy and life, expressing God’s engagement with the world in and through the Eucharist.’
The frontals (see others for different liturgical seasons below ) were worked with the assistance of Con Bolton and Elizabeth Elvin.
Beryl Dean trained at The Royal School of Needlework as well as at Bromley School of Art and the Royal College of Art. She is frequently credited with bringing ecclesiastical embroidery into the 20th century when its traditional styles and aesthetics were growing tired and anachronistic. She was a well-respected teacher and many of her students have designed and embroidered fine ecclesiastical textiles in their own right.
Further Information
Seasonal display (purple and red frontals for other liturgical seasons may be used at other times)
See Beryl Dean’s Festal frontal on the Ecclesiart map here.
Other artworks in churches by Beryl Dean: Altar frontal, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, 1969; altar frontals, St Margaret’s, King’s Lynn, 1965 & 69; Hammersmith Cope and Mitre (designed by Susan Riley, see separate Ecclesiart entry), 1968; copes for Canterbury Cathedral, 1975–80; the Jubilee Cope, Diocese of London, 1977; Windsor panels, Rutland Chantry, Windsor Castle, 1974 and many more.