This pulpit cloth was created for Decatur Presbyterian Church and was presented during the Easter Service of April 4, 2010.
The concept for this project came to me with the image of the Celtic cross featured at the center. To accurately depict a gravestone cross, I used 7 tonal colors of gray, taupe, blue and sand. It is composed of literally hundreds of French knots. By the time I had done the first hundred or so, I found myself thinking about all the people I had come to know and love in this congregation and so began to offer a prayer for each person. By the time the cross was completed, I had offered prayers for everyone in the church that I knew and all the people in my life. The cross then became both a representation of Christ's sacrificial love and an personal touchstone for my own growing faith. The long center panel is worked on a single swath of beautiful ivory Irish linen, the rays of the sun bursting forth from the cross; the love of Christ radiating out into the world.
The top and bottom panels are worked on deep blue taffeta with sequins, beads and more tiny French knots to suggest the Heavens and the dark abyss which suggested the title of this piece, "A New Morning in Christ" - from darkness into light. The deep blue represents the night sky, the heavens, the farthest reaches of God's creation. It also represents the existential solitude of a soul alone without God.
The center panel, with the Celtic cross, symbolizes the joy of spiritual awakening that comes with the knowledge of the gift of salvation in Christ's sacrificial love. The rays of light are depicted with iridescent gold nylon and swaths of pinks and golds that harmonize with the warm tones of the golden oak throughout the church sanctuary. The bottom panel is trimmed in the same deep blue taffeta and finished with elegant gold tassels.
Life experiences and careful observation offer inspiration for most of my work. Such was the case for the embroidered images above. Together they tell the life cycle of the Gulf Frittilary. As a caterpillar, it feeds almost exclusively on the Passion Flower, Passiflora Incarnata. I had seen both at the Georgia coast on a birding trip one weekend to Tybee Island. The caterpillars were munching through the leaves of the Passion Flower, leaving them looking like lacework. And the butterflies I saw at the dunes on Sea Island were dancing about the heads of goldenrod, sipping as much nectar as they could to fuel up for their fall migration.
Metamorphosis has often been equated with the Resurrection because of the obvious; the seemingly miraculous transformation from an earth bound being to a beautiful spirit of the air. Renaissance needlework artists frequently employed this theme to tell the story of Christ symbolically. I embroidered this segment of the panel with hand-dyed silks and cottons.
The rose has been for centuries a powerful Christian symbol; the red rose for Christ's sacrifice and the white rose for Mary's purity. For this composition, I chose the common wild rose; a flower found in hedgerows and in the countryside, but very beautiful in its simplicity. These roses were worked in single strands of twisted silk in three shades of pink. The leaves were worked in both silk and cotton for added textural depth.
This last group of images are also from this same altar cloth. The two crosses appear in the center. The cross above left is a Latin lexagram: Dux=Life, Rex=King, Lex=Law, and Lux=Light. The center cross is the cross of Christ who embodies all these principles. The center image is a Greek cross with the another lexagram. The image to the right is the common pokeweed. I chose to include this lowly plant to symbolize the homely beauty of even the least of God's creation. The berries are shown in various stages of ripeness. Notice the handsome red veins on the leaves that contrast beautifully with the deep purple berries.
