Beryl Dean

Beryl Dean, embroiderer, designer for ballet, teacher and writer: born 2 August 1911; MBE 1975; married 1974 Wilfrid Phillips (died 1993); died London 27 March 2001.

Beryl Dean, embroiderer, designer for ballet, teacher and writer: born 2 August 1911; MBE 1975; married 1974 Wilfrid Phillips (died 1993); died London 27 March 2001.

Beryl Dean was an important innovator in the field of 20th-century ecclesiastical embroidery, as a practitioner, as an inspirational teacher and as a writer.

Although not outwardly religious, she was in sympathy with the aesthetic adventurousness of the Liturgical Movement as it developed in Britain after the Second World War. Her remarkable book Ideas for Church Embroidery (1968) was in effect a post-war modernist visual primer, which included the new landscape revealed by micro-photography, images of pueblo pots, Henry Moore sculptures and Picasso aquatints.

Dean came to ecclesiastical embroidery almost by chance. She grew up in Bromley, Kent, the artistic first child of middle-class parents. In 1929 they were persuaded by sympathetic neighbours to allow their daughter to train at the Royal School of Needlework. Although she swiftly became a skilled needlewoman, she found the course narrow and went on to study at Bromley School of Art, where she learnt millinery and dress design under the outstanding guidance of the school's head, Elizabeth Grace Thomson.

She remained for one and a half years, winning a Royal Exhibition to the Royal College of Art in 1935. There she studied embroidery, at which technically she already excelled, discovered an intense love for the ballet and, unusually, combined her studies with teaching at Bromley School of Art. She graduated in 1938. Foreseeing the Second World War she took a full-time job at Eastbourne School of Art and during the war years gave classes in make-do-and-mend and taught convalescent soldiers.

She also designed and made costumes, and subsequently sets, for the Arts Theatre Ballet, made up of dancers from a short-lived company formed by Anton Dolin and Alicia Markova and based at Eastbourne's Winter Gardens Theatre. Dean's designs for the ballet were widely admired and included in the Victoria and Albert Museum publication British Stage Design (1950). In 1946 she took a lectureship in Newcastle at King's College (ancestor of Newcastle University), returning south in 1947 to nurse her parents. Dean cared for them until their deaths, subsequently setting up a small haute couture workshop.

While at Bromley she had made her first important religious embroidery panel, Madonna (1934), now in the textile collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum. However, her career as a dedicated embroiderer began after a commission from the Needlework Development Scheme in 1953. Intended to raise standards in embroidery, the scheme was linked to schools, colleges of art and women's organisations and had been set up in Scotland in 1934 and revived and extended to cover Great Britain in 1945.

Dean created five exemplary pieces for the scheme, four of which were ecclesiastical. While at the Royal College of Needlework, she had been taught by Rebecca Crompton and she took Crompton's radicalism into the field of church embroidery, using new, unexpected materials and a bold mix of figuration and abstraction. Dean recalled:

At first people were horrified at the use of materials like suede, kid, pearls and cellophane on ecclesiastical embroidery. Shop assistants almost refused to serve one with dress or furnishing fabrics if they knew it was for church embroidery.

From 1952 she taught part-time at Hammersmith College of Art and Building. In 1958 she started an ecclesiastical embroidery class there and in the same year had a solo show at the Colour Council and published the first of many books, Ecclesiastical Embroidery. She also ran adult education classes at the Stanhope Institute in Bloomsbury, which became affectionately known as "The Deanery".

Dean was a remarkable teacher, not least because she involved her students in her major commissions. The five handsome copes completed in 1975 for Canterbury Cathedral were created by her adult education class, as were her ambitious Jubilee cope and mitre presented to the London Diocese in 1977. This was a conservative design by her standards, depicting the spires of all the London churches and Royal Peculiars. But her finest work represented a synthesis of old skills ­ stumpwork, white work, or nué and other metal-thread techniques ­ and daring artistry.

She was conscious that changing liturgical practices, not least the celebration of communion with the priest facing the congregation, had implications for vestment design. She frequently took the architecture of her commissioning churches as inspiration, particularly in the case of her cope and mitre for Edward Maufe's Guildford Cathedral.

Her work ranged widely. She created a three-dimensional Madonna for All Saints, East Finchley, in London, employing the skills of embroiderer, milliner, sculptor and glovemaker. But she embroidered in the spirit of a muralist too, designing and making single-handed five large-scale panels depicting the life of Christ for the Rutland Chancery at St George's Chapel, Windsor. These were completed in 1974 and executed in a powerful neo-Byzantine style.

In 1990 Dean organised "British Ecclesiastical Embroidery Today", an exhibition at St Paul's Cathedral that displayed her enormous talent and influence but also raised doubts about the ability of her remoter followers to combine her level of innovation and skill.

Beryl Dean was a stylish woman, beautifully coiffed and attired. She never abandoned the turns of phrase typical of the inter-war upper middle classes. Her work was her life and she regarded social and leisure pursuits as moments wasted. At the age of 63 she found time to make a happy marriage with the widowed Wilfrid Phillips, a notary public, whose first wife had been her beloved cousin.

Tanya Harrod