To mark the 290th anniversary of the Fire Procession in the Limburg town of Thorn, Ángeles Nieto designed 'The Flaming Mantle’, a ceremonial cloak in the rich textile tradition of the Abbey Church. The procession is the town’s way of expressing gratitude that Thorn was not completely destroyed in the 1728 fire, and so the cloak represents fire, water and heaven.
The flaming red and orange cloak is a reference to the fire while the blue embroidered collar symbolises both the water that extinguished the fire as well as life and the divine. Thorn itself is depicted in several images. Modern elements, such as satellites and pollution, are combined with religious details, such as the hands of a man and woman holding up a communion wafer shaped like the earth. The use of different embroidery stitches, various stitch densities and layering of different coloured threads gives the embroidery surprising nuances. ‘The Flaming Mantle’ is a visual feast, rich in texture due to the relief created by the overlapping threads.
