I have a very complex relationship with the first Wolf Hall quilt. Ten months after putting the last stitch in place, I am still not sure what I think of it. I think I am reaching the conclusion that it isn’t a discrete piece of work in its own right but it is a jumping off point for other work – and I am happy with that conclusion.

Because of lockdown restrictions in 2020 and 2021, no-one apart from me was in the same space as this piece until it was almost complete. I didn’t show the work in progress to anyone face to face; and I didn’t have the space to see the whole thing. In fact I didn’t actually see the piece as a whole myself until May 2022 when I was finally in a space that could accommodate the whole unrolled length of 46 feet.

Before that, the only way I could see the quilt in its entirety was to have it photographed.

Michael Wicks, the marvellous photographer who produced a great set of pictures of the work, did a great job in taking detail shots. Before we met, we talked about the shape of the project and its length; I drew him out a map of each section on index cards so he could match them up with the photographs I had commissioned. At his studio we tried to lay the piece out flat but it was actually too long, being longer than the width of the building, and so it ended up being folded back on itself. But within 24 hours of dropping it off, I had an image of how the first Wolf Hall quilt looked thanks to Michael’s photographic magic.

The piece didn’t look as I had expected, and I had some difficulty working out what I had made until a friend said it reminded her of a piece of code. The significance was in the detail.

And after a couple of weeks, when I looked at the full image again, I realised she was right. I started to view the quilt in that light – as a piece of code that represented my personal response to Wolf Hall; I have detailed notes, sketchbook diagrams, a colour coding system, and a key that unlocks each reference on the quilt, but without these, can the whole code be read? As Cromwell himself wonders, when reading some of Cardinal Wolsey’s letters to the rulers of Europe, could the encryption be more tricky?

In the same way that one can’t see the contents of a book all at once, I realised that one shouldn’t be able to see the whole quilt all at once. It’s meant to be rolled – in a nod to Cromwell being Master of the Rolls – only revealing part of its code at any one time. The encryption should indeed be tricky.

When I finally unrolled the Wolf Hall quilt a couple of weeks ago, as the guest of a very welcoming quilting group, I was in a space large enough to accommodate it, and eight quilters held it up along its length. It was a very intense experience: even though I made it, I hadn’t appreciated the scale of it before that. I am still not sure what I think of it, but I have now been able to see what the entire piece looks like all at once.

And now, once again, it is rolled up, hiding its codes and its tricky encryption.