Should hero banners show the person's work, or what happened to them?

I stitched a memorial banner for a local war memorial rededication a few years back, and I wrestled with the same question. My instinct at first was to make it sombre, all dark wools and muted greys, and it looked like a funeral card. The group who commissioned it kept asking for something people woud actually want to stand in front of, so I reworked it with goldwork on the central emblem and kept the border in plain unbleached linen. The contrast did the talking. Shine for what they gave, plain cloth for what it cost.

So my take is that you don't have to choose. Your reaction-diffusion pattern is allready doing the honest work, because anyone who knows Turing's story knows the mathematics kept going after everything the state did to him. The spots and stripes are proof he was still himself, still thinking, thru all of it. If you want the harder truth stitched in somewhere, put it small and quiet. A date worked in backstitch along the hem, or a single line of text on the reverse where only the carriers see it. I did that on my banner and it felt right. The parade crowd gets the gold, the people who carry it get the weight.

For me the answer came out of a practical problem more than a philosophical one. I made a banner for our union branch a couple of years back, about a woman who'd been blacklisted in the fifties. The committee wanted her union victories front and centre. I couldn't face leaving out the eleven months she spent unemployed, so I made it double sided. The front is her at the rally, the reverse carries the strike dates and the words of the tribunal that ruined her. One banner, both truths, and whoever carries it has to know what's on thier back.

It's about 90cm by 70cm on 16 count aida, backed with cotton drill so the reverse stitching doesn't show through. The lettering on the dark side is just simple cross stitch in DMC 310, nothing fancy, because I wanted it to read like a document rather than a decoration. Maybe that's a dodge, maybe a banner should commit to one thing. But for Turing especally, the conviction and the codebreaking aren't two stories, they're one story. Splitting them feels false to me. The reaction-diffusion pattern you landed on is lovely, and you could still keep it as the ground fabric and stitch the harder facts right over it, so the maths holds up everthing else.

One thing to factor in is that shine doesn't last the way you'd think. I used real gilt purl on a banner for our village hall maybe six years back, and it's gone noticeably dull already, gone a sort of old bronze colour. Which frankly suits a Turing piece better than factory-bright metallics ever would. The celebration literally tarnishes and the underlying silk stays true. You could even plan for it, pick threads that age the way you want the message to age. Have you thought at all about how the colours will look in ten years, not just on parade day?

I did a piece on my gran for a family exhibition last year and her daughter nearly pulled it because I'd included the years she spent in hospital. But other relatives came up to me at the opening and said those years were part of her too, that they'd sat with her through them. Since then I figure you can't decide for them what counts as the hard truth.

For what it's worth, I don't think joy and tragedy cancel each other out on the same cloth. He had a life before 1952 and it was a real one. Stitch both if you've got room.

Might be too late for your planning but here's a thougt from the old school. My mother did chapel banners in the 60s and she'd work the sad parts into the ground fabric itself, coarse undyed wool underneath, so the bright top layer sat on something rough. You only saw it if you lifted the hem. Turing's maths coud work the same way, the reaction-diffusion pattern on good silk over a plain canvas backing, and the backing stays hidden unless somebody goes looking. Old counted thread samplers did it too, cheerful borders with a mournful verse worked small in the middle. The makers back then seemed to think both belonged on the same cloth. Never did them any harm.

I can't get behind the hidden-on-the-reverse idea from the war memorial post. Tucking the 1952 conviction where only the carriers see it isn't honouring the hard truth, it's filing it away. I did a piece about a relative who died by suicide years back and I put the date right in the border, same weight as everything else, and it was that detail people stopped and talked to me about. Hidden grief protects the viewer, not the person you're stitching. If the maths carries the whole design, why not let one line of the pattern break or distort where the story turns dark? That way it's visible, it's part of the cloth, and nobody has to lift a hem to find it.