IT IS just over ten years since Jacqui Parkinson signed up for a short textile course. Since then, she has gone on to create what could be the largest-ever textile project by one person.
Her huge, vividly coloured panels depicting scenes from the Bible have been exhibited in nearly 30 cathedrals and abbeys across the UK, and, she estimates, have been seen by more than a million people. Created from silks on painted and dyed cotton, the panels stand nearly three metres high and dance with spirals and stars, ring with choirs of angels, or teem with fish and birds. Rich in symbolism, they have resonated with old and young alike.
JACQUI AND ANDREW PARKINSONJacqui Parkinson
Eighteen new panels created by Parkinson, “Threads Through the Cross”, will be launched in 2025. The set will be exhibited in ten venues — again, mainly cathedrals — over the next two years, along with the two sets that bookend them: the 14 panels that make up “Threads Through Revelation” and the 12 panels of “Threads Through Creation”. The three together, collectively named “Threads Through the Bible”, represent some 25 million stitches (her sewing machine keeps count).
She has applied to the Guinness World Records for the record of the largest textile-art project by a single person. Embroidery magazine praised Parkinson’s panels for their “astonishing . . . scale and variety”, and said that the new instalment was “set to stun”.
“I started off with the book of Revelation, because I love the book, because it’s a picture book,” she explains. “And then, having done the ‘All is good at the end,’ I thought, I’ll go to the beginning and do the ‘All is good at the beginning.’ And then I thought, we need something to connect, because we’re not in the ‘All is good at the present,’ as we know. So then I decided to do the cross, because that connects the beginning and the end.” Her wish, she explains, “is to have that overall long view”.
Behind their impressive size and colour are humble beginnings: the panels begin as old bed sheets — sheets that “have been cared for and mended, and have been precious and have held, you know, birth, death, or bits in between”, she explains. She wanted to convey the idea “that we don’t start from new and from somewhere fresh, but we build on what’s gone before”.
PARKINSON’s arresting creations draw on her own career as a drama teacher, performance artist, and storyteller. While living in south-west London, she founded the Lantern Arts Centre in a Methodist church in Raynes Park, and hundreds of children and adults flocked there to learn singing, acting, mime, and dance, and put on productions. They still do, she tells me.
She moved to Devon in 2008, after the death from cancer of her husband, Rob Frost, the Methodist minister and author and founder of the Easter People camp and the mission agency Share Jesus International (Obituary, 21 November 2007).
“Although I didn’t want my husband to die, I can see . . . I don’t like to say a plan, but I can see it came — it made sense, what I was doing.” She began pouring her raw feelings of loss into creativity, stitching words and images linked to bereavement on to old handkerchiefs. These became an exhibition, “Good Grief?”, and a book.
She has married again, and her new husband, Andrew, who photographs her works, will join her as she accompanies the panels on their tour, leading workshops, giving talks, being involved in the community in whatever way the cathedral asks them to be. She lives by faith, supported financially by individuals and small grants.
Jacqui and Andrew ParkinsonAn embroidered panel from “Threads through Creation”
Each set of panels has presented additional challenges: while the scenes from the Revelation of St John lent themselves to abstract imagery, and the creation series required depictions of plants and animals, the third demanded people and, therefore, faces. “I tried lots of different kinds of ways of doing faces,” she says. “Because I use fabric, it was just impossible to get that detail of emotion in the faces. So, in the end, I went back to icons. So that’s where those large eyes and that very stoical face comes from.”
Parkinson, who describes herself as “between Baptist and Anglican”, is ecumenical in her inspiration, drawing from Orthodox icons and sculpture, oil painting from Roman Catholic Italy and Spain, medieval illustration, and church stained glass. Behind her chair in her study at home in Devon — we speak on Zoom — is The Trinity by the Russian Orthodox iconographer Andrei Rublev, and a photograph of Michelangelo’s Pietà. “I nick from nearly everybody,” she jokes; but she credits the artists in the literature that accompanies her exhibitions.
One artist’s “nicking” is another’s homage. Parkinson’s original inspiration came to her while standing in front of Marc Chagall’s large-scale scenes from the Old Testament in Vence, in southern France. “On nearly every single one he puts the crucifix, even if it’s very small.” A young lamb with its legs bound appears in her pietà (which she has entitled There are no words), based on Francisco de Zurbarán’s devotional painting Agnus Dei.
SHE has inset small images of birds into the new panels — partly to link back to “Threads Through Creation”, and partly for children to enjoy (“This story is a little bit solemn in places,” admits Parkinson, grandmother to four and step-grandmother to two more), and partly as a nod to the medieval tradition of illustrating manuscripts with birds and other creatures.
Some of her avian choices hark back to tradition: the robin appears in the crucifixion scene, its red breast linked to drops of Jesus’s blood falling from the crown of thorns. Others are her invention: she has added a cuckoo to the scene depicting Judas’s betrayal of Jesus in Gethsemane, “because he’s going to kick the other disciples out of the nest, and eventually he’s going to even get rid of the host bird”.
Her training as a Methodist local preacher and her enjoyment of the Bible have given her the tools to translate scripture visually, and she has found unexpected connections. The two trees at the heart of the Garden of Eden — the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil — appear not only in the creation set, but one forms the backdrop of the panel depicting the baptism of Jesus, and the other, his temptation.
Jacqui and Andrew ParkinsonThe 14 “Threads through Revelation” panels on display in Chester Cathedral
They reappear together in the crucifixion scene: from the crosses of the two criminals executed alongside Jesus, leaves and fruit are visible. “One [man] chooses to continue to ridicule Jesus. The other one chooses to say, ‘Today, will you remember me when you come in your kingdom?’. . . It’s the two trees, and the choice of which fruit to take. . . Choose to do things your own way, or choose to do things God’s way.”
There is an element of dialogue through these panels, the performance artist coming to the fore. Whereas in the crucifixion panel she presents the viewer with a question, in others she is wanting to tell the stories recounted in the Bible. Here, she has found church stained glass helpful. “Because the people were illiterate, they use the images to learn the stories. And, today, I believe there are a lot of people who are illiterate about the stories of the Bible; so I am choosing to use images to tell those stories.”
WHAT response have her works had? The favourite word seems to be “Wow!” she says with a smile. She receives several emails a week, and keeps a comment book beside her exhibits. “Some people write that they just walked about praising God or thanking God,” she says. Not everyone agrees with the theology that she articulates in her accompanying descriptions — her creation panels drew criticism from seven-day creationists and scientists alike, “but most people are touched somewhere with the images.”
She insists: “I’m not trying to convert anybody; I’m just raising questions and saying, ‘Here I am showing you stories that, to me, reveal a God of love, and it’s your choice [how to respond].’”
Jacqui and Andrew ParkinsonTwo of the “Threads through the Cross” embroidered panels
Certainly, the panels that have already been displayed have resonated with a wide variety of people, sometimes in unexpected ways. When the creation panels were exhibited in Leominster Priory for seven weeks in the summer of 2024 — attracting 17,500 people — the priory’s arts team ran activities to accompany the exhibition, part-funded by the diocese of Hereford. One was an afternoon of interpretative dance for children, who included those attending the local special-needs school. Ceri Hibbert, a member of the priory arts team, said that one boy with complex needs “danced all the way through the church, with a group, and he was representing a bird”. His younger sister “was in tears. She’d never seen her brother able to participate in a mainstream activity.”
Parkinson hopes that her new set will also speak profoundly to its audience. While working on its final panel, Pentecost, she returned to her studio to find a woman standing before the spectacular scene of the risen Jesus in the centre of a circular rainbow, flames made from gold leaf coming from his body. She noticed that the woman had tears in her eyes. In that moment, she thought: “That’s what I would like: the heart response.’”
Details of the exhibition and Jacqui Parkinson’s work can be found at: jacqui-textile.com