Kenwood Stitchathon

Inspired by Stephen Farthing’s Strike a Pose exhibition at Kenwood House, our Young Producers helped to plan a day for other young people to engage with Stephen’s work through a stitchathon workshop.

Strike a Pose

Since the 1970s, Stephen has been fascinated by historic ‘swagger portraiture’ (think Hans Holbein’s famous portrait of Henry VIII) and the messaging of vast displays of sumptuous wealth and power.

Jacobean artist William Larkin (described as such for living during the reign of King James I of England, 1603-1625) painted a series of portraits held in Kenwood House’s Suffolk Collection.

The paintings depict noble men and women in their finery, representing their families and showing off their status in society. The paintings are rich in colour and spare no details.

Borne from this fascination, Stephen has created his own series of paintings in response to the ‘swagger portraiture’ styles. These paintings were displayed at Kenwood House from May – November 2024 as Stephen was in residency at Kenwood creating another painting from the collection.

You can read more about swagger portraiture and Stephen’s work here

We were interested in the overt and eye-catching colours and patterns that are trademarks of Stephen’s artwork, and how other young people might like to connect with it.

We also noticed how Stephen’s portraits made us view the original Suffolk Collection portraits completely differently – we were picking up on details, patterns, textures of materials, that we hadn’t noticed before.

So, we set to planning an event where young people could come to see the Strike a Pose exhibition themselves and respond creatively through sewing and textiles.

On 1st November, with a group of young people who were interested in learning a new skill in textiles, we met up at Kenwood House.

We had a tour of the exhibition with Kenwood’s curator Louise Cooling, learning about Stephen’s process and Louise’s own interpretation of the collection.

We asked questions to prompt the group into thinking analytically about the exhibition. Some of these included – do the paintings grab your attention? What are your eyes drawn to? What’s the modern relevance of these paintings? Do Stephen’s portraits tell a different story to the Suffolk Collection? What is that story?

Then, we headed to the education room to take part in a crochet-making workshop, creating crochet coasters inspired by the patterns and colours of Stephen’s paintings.

It was a really successful day and a great way to connect art to textiles!