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Global Perspective: British Art Quilts
Written by Linzee Kull McCray
The quilts of British artist Lynn Setterington celebrate the everyday. Images of spatulas, watering cans, scissors, and even plastic shopping bags (as in Mums are Heroes, Too) are carefully hand-stitched into her cotton art quilts.
Lynn’s art quilts draw on traditions far from England’s shores. She anchors her quilt’s muslin layers with kantha, an embroidery technique from Bangladesh that uses simple running stitches. This type of embroidery can be quickly stitched for everyday use or more carefully worked into intricate patterns in quilts intended as heirlooms. Asian immigrants brought the technique to Britain and a 1988 London exhibition of kantha inspired Setterington to incorporate the technique into her work.
Photo courtesy of International Quilt Study Center, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2006.015.0001.
