Christmas Cards: Festal Frontal, by Beryl Dean

Beryl Dean’s Festal Frontal for King’s Lynn Minster is a joyous and rhythmic assembly of symbolic motifs on an off-white silk background. This detail shows crosses of silver, red, gold, brown and white, encrusted in beads or sequins, sometimes encircled by gold braid. Between their interlocking forms, the background of vertical appliqué and machine-work ‘shading’ elevates their three-dimensional appearance and sets up a tension between verticality and the outstretched horizontals of each cross. 

Dean was a leading designer and embroiderer from the 1930s through to the end of the millennium. She was a valued author of a number of publications which established modern ecclesiastical embroidery as a discipline in its own right. Dean’s work has been exhibited globally in the USA, Japan, Australia, South Africa and Europe. Her pieces are to be found in cathedrals and churches in several countries, and in private and public collections including the Embroiderers’ Guild, the Gawthorpe Textiles Collection and the Victoria and Albert Museum.  

This image will feature in a new book, edited by A+C, to be published in 2024 called Visual Communion: the art, architecture and craft of the Eucharist.

Reproduced with kind permission of King’s Lynn Minster and The Beryl Dean Education Trust

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