Silver threads…and gold

By Alex Newman

IT’S A GLORIOUS fall day when I visit needlework artist Seanagh Murdoch at her studio in the woods outside Peterborough. A canopy of trees resplendent in Canadian fall colours and a winding gravel road lead up to her board and batten home.

With a South African accent softened to a barely perceptible lilt after more than 30 years in Canada, Seanagh ushers me through the cranberry red door, and into her light-filled studio. Filing cabinets line its perimeter, and two long tables are piled high with colourful things -- bins of thread in gold, silver, bronze, green, blue, and needleworks-in-progress of cerulean, jade and claret. Lamps clipped on the table’s edge provide extra task light over a work stool, and two irons are at the ready nearby. A wood-burning stove cuts the chill of the early fall day.

Seanagh Murdoch. Photo: Alex NewmanThis is where Seanagh spends most days, painstakingly restoring old and crumbling antependium cloths, making new communion linens, and designing altar cloths and clergy stoles.

She loves the variety – from the linen days spent cutting and hemming to the restoration work requiring incredible patience.

“Linens can be very repetitive work, slow and tedious – but I love that, you lose track of time, and think about everything. The same with coloured work, especially gold, because it seems like miles and miles of tiny, evenly-spaced stitches. But it’s cathartic,” she says.

Some pieces that come for restoration are so fragile, only the embroidery is holding them together, she says. The process of stabilizing the piece on a frame, then carefully snipping away the old embroidery from the cloth is done “with a big deep breath and a lot of prayer.”

If the embroidery is in decent shape, that might take an hour per square inch, but if the fabric is crumbly and the threads are going, a square inch could take as much as three or four hours.

It’s not always easy to find the right fabrics to mount old embroidery onto, and Seanagh frequently hunts as far afield as England. But she also has a pile of remnants, saved from old cloths that were intact except for the edges. Some materials are fortuitous gifts, like the pure gold threads she once got from someone whose grandmother used to do this kind of work for her own church.

Designing is a challenge: “I know what I want it to look like, but it’s hard to get what’s in my head onto paper, and from there into thread.”

One of her favourite pieces – which took a month to complete -- now drapes the altar in St John’s in Peterborough. “It was being created especially for Pentecost, and when I started to think about it, the notion of a spark that gets the fire going started to take root.”

The large cloth – three panels with a central one of 36” wide by 39” long, and side panels of 10x39 – was created out of small pieces of red, yellow and gold silk sewn like mosaics, and resembling a flame with threads that catch the light. “When it’s up on the altar with only the chancel lights on and church quite dark, it gives the impression of being on fire.”

Seanagh is mostly self-taught, except for her “apprenticeship” at her grandmother’s knee. “When I was a child growing up in South Africa, my grandmother would say, don’t just sit around and twiddle your thumbs, if you have nothing to do, I can find you a needle and thread. So we sewed – clothes, even underwear.”

It was the 1950s, and the small Anglican church she attended offered about the only created art in her rural South African community. Seanagh was drawn to the stained glass windows, and as an adult growing in faith, she had a moment when it fell into place – the art, the faith, the sewing – “and I realized how much art must be part of sacred life.”

But it wasn’t until years later that she was able to implement the vision. After meeting her Canadian-born husband Jim in the mid-1970s, and traveling through Europe, Africa, South and Central America, the US, they arrived in Canada.

Although the peripatetic life beckoned, they needed money so John, an electrical engineer, took a job with GE in Peterborough. They soon settled happily into the rural community and had two daughters in quick succession. Later Seanagh started work part- time as a school counsellor.

But the needlework kept calling: “I had seen some beautiful old work in churches, felt strongly about conservation and loved the discipline.”

So she approached her own church, St John’s Anglican, and suggested the plain damask cloths that hung on the prayer desk could be made more beautiful with embroidery. Laughing, she recalls the only comment was: “Isn’t that kind of Catholic?”

She respected the congregation’s wish not to cover up the carved wood, but over the years, she managed to get a little decoration in.

Meanwhile, other churches eagerly sought her out, and her business started to grow. But there are few people left who can do the work and at the moment she has more projects than she can handle.

“It’s the same as everything else in the church – nobody has time. The young women are busy with jobs and families, and the older ones who always did the laundry, ironing, polishing brasses and sewing, are fewer.”

That’s why when a church asks for communion linens, they will often request a polyester blend -- it takes about two hours to iron one fair linen cloth. There are other churches that would never use anything but linen because they feel dressing the church “should go beyond convenience, in the same way Mary bathed Jesus’ feet with expensive oil,” she says.

She has provided Lenten vestments for St Mary Magdalene in Toronto, a silk funeral pall and many linens for St. Martin’s in the Fields, and restored a very old frontal and superfrontal (circa mid-1800s) for the Sisters of St John the Divine and helped them redevelop their stitching skills so they could maintain their very old and beautiful pieces.

Some of her larger projects include white and green hangings for Holy Trinity Streetsville; white hangings, chasubles, and purple hangings for St. Bartholomew’s in Ottawa; a white superfrontal, green superfrontal and stoles for Northside Baptist in Atlanta, Georgia; restoration of copes and repair of the frontal for St George’s Cathedral in Kingston; white frontal and blue frontal for St. Phillip’s in Unionville; green frontal for All Saints, Collingwood; and chasubles for Church of the Redeemer, Toronto.

Seanagh says this doesn’t include the many stoles, small hangings, veils and “what at the moment feels like a mountain of linen as everyone gets ready for Christmas services” for a number of other churches.

Her range of clients – rural, urban, high church, low church -- has opened her eyes “to the enormous breadth and depth” of the Anglican Church, especially as it plays out with the visual side of the church.

“Art in the church has meaning, whatever your religion. When you have inherited art, such as these beautiful needlework cloths, it’s of enormous importance to the tradition and history of the church and must be protected. It’s not like you’re making a party dress or Halloween costume; it’s for the continuation of the sacraments.”

The needlework has played a part in Seanagh’s own faith journey: “The more I do the more I feel it’s relevant. Why we have the symbolism in the church is twofold – number one, it’s a teaching tool, and secondly to beautify a place that we want to honour. Like Mary pouring oil over Jesus’ feet, this very special space we should honour with the best of our abilities and the best materials we can use.”

For more information see www.strandsembroidery.com

Some Church Vestments and Linens

Antependium:  a veil or hanging for the front of an altar  

Chasuble:        a loose, sleeveless outer vestment worn by some clergy when celebrating the Eucharist                         

Cope:               a long, cloak-like vestment worn by a priest or bishop

Frontal:            covering for the front of an altar

Pall:                 a cloth spread over a coffin        

Stole:               a long narrow cloth worn by a deacon like a sash over the left shoulder and tied under the right arm; or by a priest or bishop over both shoulders and hanging down to the knees