A Stratigraphy of Ideas

Long overdue, I know. Truth is I’ve had my head down enjoying an incredibly creative and productive few weeks.

I know I am exceedingly privileged to be doing what I am doing, but I also feel a big responsibility to make the most of it and to be accountable. For this reason everything I do has to have a set purpose, an end goal. I find it hard to let myself experiment, play or just try things out, even though I know this is an integral part of any artist’s practice.

This has made me drive myself into the ground more than once including a couple of weeks into September, when I came to a complete stop physically and mentally. Rescue was on the way in the form of an unexpected holiday in Whitby with my aunt and uncle. I cannot begin to say how fabulous a time I had, we stayed in a beautiful cottage a stone’s throw from the beach.

We explored some amazing places including the ruins of a castle in a wood; coming across massive buttresses and walls in amongst the trees is something I will not forget, more like something a 1930s South American explorer would come across and very different to the clean landscaped castle ruins in towns and parks one is used to.

I used to work at a Cistercian abbey, Bordesley, so I had always been aware of Rievaulx but had never visited before and the ruins were utterly spectacular aided by some fantastic late summer sunshine. Someone should paint it, no really, they should.

As a break, as a change, as a laugh, as access to the sea and fresh air and exercise, it was a marvellous and much-needed reset. But it has lingered with me since and not least because of one day we decided to escape some coastal fog and headed for the town of Pickering.

I have a particular interest in medieval wall paintings, not that I had ever seen any beyond the pages of a book. I am very curious by the relationship of medieval tapestry to their contemporary art forms. For example the relationship between illuminated manuscripts and the Apocalypse of Angers and the Halberstadt tapestries are well known and I always assumed frescos and wall paintings too must hold some relevance considering their shared mural use. Being so interested in medieval tapestries – which have so rarely survived – I am forced to try to draw inference to what the tapestries may have looked like through other forms.

So I was very excited to see on the Pickering high street a small sign pointing to a church and its wall paintings. But nothing could have prepared me for pushing open the church door and being looked down upon by a gigantic St Christopher across the nave.

All the walls were coated in figures depicting the lives of the Saints, the Passion and Resurrection, the descent to Hell. I was mesmerised. It was not just their liveliness and vibrancy, it was a communication, a link with the ancestors they were based on, the hand that drew them and the centuries of church goers who looked upon them until they were covered up during the Reformation. It was a reminder too of how much has been lost.

My interest in the relationship between medieval tapestries and other art forms is not just academic, I have spent time wanting to explore this artistically too, but I could never figure out how to do it, I could only ever envisage a pastiche, something quite pointless to weave, and so it had drifted to the background. Before Whitby my plans were to make a start on a landscape as discussed elsewhere in this blog.

But when I got home seeing those wall paintings made me all the more determined to respect my intuition. There was something there I wanted and needed to explore. The only way I was going to get it out of my system was to give in.

I let myself weave whatever I wanted, and with no end-game in sight, and without talking myself out of it. I followed my whims, experimented, played. The result has been the formation of a stratigraphy of ideas on the loom, half-finished, half thought-out samples and trials. I was right, initial samples based on the wall paintings were silly pastiches, but as the weeks evolved so did my ideas and so did my realisation of what I was trying to achieve as a weaver, a more honing down of my focus as an artist and an acknowledgement of how I can push the techniques I have been developing this year even further. I feel I know myself better. The result is a new design for a tapestry, far more complicated and colourful than anything I have attempted before, but potentially rather fab.

I love the tapestries I’ve been weaving this year, and that I’ve found something unique to me as a weaver, but I have been conscious that there were limitations with how far I could go with it and the extent to which it would give me scope to explore what I want to narratively. I’m super pleased to have broken through that barrier. The cartoon is drawn, the colours selected the samples woven and recorded. All that is left is to get warped up and to get on with it. I need to finish it before I start my Fellowship so I suspect I am going to have to keep my head down for a while to get it done. I’m not trying to be a tease about the nature of the new tapestry by showing the samples, I just thought it best to talk more about it and the ideas behind it once it has properly got going.

I ‘ve also made some changes to how I work, whether I will stick to them or not I don’t know. The most significant is that I have started to ban myself from the workroom at the weekend. Whilst I am not yet spending the time running through flower-filled fields and basking in the sunshine, it has given me the space to try things I wouldn’t have allowed myself before, exploring off-loom weaving techniques, blowing the dust off my sewing machine and mucking about with free-form embroidery and more drawing and sketching.

In amongst all this I am happy to report the 1in4 exhibition (above) discussed in my last post was fantastic. The quality of work was phenomenal and I was really proud to be amongst them. I have just learned that several of my tapestries have been selected for an exhibition at the Platform Gallery next year – more on that later. I also had a great day with the Bradford Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers talking about tapestry, I was made to feel very welcome and really enjoyed myself. And I was thrilled to take part in Crafted by Hand in Masham (below), always a wonderfully organised event and a great opportunity to get young folks weaving. Much work has also been done getting plans together for my travels in the Spring.

I am looking forward to visiting the Knitting and Stitching Show in Harrogate this week and very glad to see a weaver has been included amongst the gallery exhibitors, the very innovative tapestry artist Cos Ahmet. I can’t wait to see his work in the flesh. Of course I’ll tell you all about it. Until then, ta ta for now xx