A Quarter-Century of Craft: Melinda Piesse Tops the Hand & Lock Awards

Marking twenty-five years of championing embroidery’s most exciting emerging voices, the 2025 Hand & Lock Prize for Embroidery returned to London with characteristic flair. Over 120 guests gathered on 4 November at Gallery Rosenfeld, Fitzrovia, for an evening celebrating innovation in stitch in a fitting tribute to the world’s longest-running embroidery atelier and its continued commitment to craft. Across four categories, this year’s winners ranged from student designers to established textile artists, with Charlotte Farrant, Severina Seidl, Ilaria Harris and others recognised for their outstanding work.

But it was Australian textile artist Melinda Piesse, winner of First Prize in the Open Textile Art category, who captivated both judges and visitors with a work that feels as monumental in ambition as in scale: The Batavia Tapestry.

The Batavia Tapestry, Melinda Piesse

Piesse’s embroidered sailcloth — a three-by-five-metre linen canvas — revisits the tragic 1629 wreck of the Dutch East India Company flagship Batavia, a story marked by shipwreck, mutiny, mass murder, and an eventual, improbable rescue. While the narrative itself has long fascinated maritime historians, Piesse’s interpretation brings a distinctive sensitivity to the material culture of survival. Her tapestry integrates appliqué, crewelwork, goldwork and hand-dyed wool felt, drawing on years of research that included archaeological journals, maritime archives and studies of 17th-century rigging and sail-making.

Detail from The Batavia Tapestry, Melinda Piesse

The limited palette of olive, indigo, cochineal red, gold and madder nods to the Bayeux Tapestry, and like its medieval predecessor, The Batavia Tapestry compresses sweeping human drama into finely stitched vignettes: passengers scrambling to shore; the mutineers, adorned in stolen silks and braids, “dressed to kill”; the officers’ desperate departure in the longboat; and the fierce battle that accompanied the rescue ship’s return...

(...)

Want to read more of this article?
We are proud to be a subscriber-funded publication with members in 185 countries. We know our readership is passionate about textiles, so we invite you to help us preserve and promote the stories, memories, and histories that fabric holds. Your support allows us to publish our magazine, and also ‘what's on’ information, and subscription interviews, reviews, and long-read articles in our online blog. 

ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER? CLICK HERE TO ACCESS CONTENT

Or, to continue reading….


Magazine subscribers automatically get free access to all our online content. We send the access code by email with the publication of each issue. You will also find it on the envelope containing your magazine. Please note the access code changes every issue.

-

Image Credits:

Lead: Detail from The Batavia Tapestry by Melinda Piesse. Photo: @domi_rad

All further images as credited in photo captions.