I am an artist weaver who makes rugs and wall hangings as a woven response to both the sea, which is near to where I live, and my favourite paintings. I originally studied in the Construction Department at the West of England College of Art in Bristol in the late sixties. Though, secretly I preferred the idea of creating with textiles. My foundations years were at Winchester School of Art where at the time, intellectually scary Brian Eno, was leader of the pack. He hung around with textile students who, equally scary in a different way to 17-year-old me, zipped up to London every weekend to be part of the swinging 60’s scene.
The course in Bristol was led by a visionary teacher, Norman Potter, and although this was under the umbrella of furniture design, it was more about design generally and communication. It was heavily influenced by the Bauhaus Movement [one that mixed the likes of crafts with Fine Arts; and sought to mass produce an individual’s artistic visions- nowadays it’s often seen through the likes of geometrical buildings] but I was too young to appreciate its radical philosophy. I was the only female in that year, a useless furniture designer, and I left before finishing the course and after being told that my furniture was held together by brightly coloured paint. It was true!
A few years later a friend paid for me to do a weeklong weaving course in the wilds of Wales. I can’t remember where it was, only that I loved it. I enrolled two days a week at further education classes, with the idea of going back to art school to do textiles. I had a brilliant teacher, who revelled in having a student forty years younger than anyone else in the class and asking to be taught everything she knew. In fact, I later found out that she taught me more in one year than other students had learnt in three years. Excited by what I had learnt I leapt into the unknown of being a freelance weaver. It was only then I began to appreciate the influence of the Bauhaus aesthetic, and the brilliance of the Bristol course, led by Norman Potter.
As artists and crafts people alike know only too well, it’s hard to make a living. So, from happily weaving rugs but not earning enough money to feed my family, I slid towards leading workshops, teaching, and working in gallery education, until suddenly twenty years later I found I was doing very little weaving. About six years ago I was on the point of selling my loom. Looms take up a lot of room. Then my granddaughter asked me to teach her to weave. As a result, I became completely hooked again. But this timeI could do exactly what I wanted and didn’t have to think primarily about what would earn money.
The reason I’d always liked weaving rugs rather than cloth, was that they seemed to have heft, be more serious and if you released yourself from the seductive complexities
of multiple shaft patterns, you could venture into the world of ‘fine art’ weaving.
Stubbornly, now, I don’t plan a design or work from drawings. I prefer to work intuitively, usually thinking only about the colours beforehand. Sometimes I don’t even have a preconceived idea about when the weaving will end. I see working on the loom like painting on canvas, but with yarn. Unlike painting though, confined to the size of a canvas,I can let my weaving go on for as long as I have enough warp [the vertical threads that stretch between the bottom and the top of the loom] for. I usually put enough warp on the loom to weave up to three rugs at a time, so if I want to make one longer, I can. Yarn colours react to each other completely differently to paint. With each piece I make I try to capture this difference and express the excitementI feel of the vibrancy of colours next to each other. I still like weaving for commission but now I like the challenge of creating something dynamic from an individual palette of colours. I’m grateful for the lucky early influence of that unconscious immersion in all things Bauhaus, that I think it is still evident in my work today.
Around the same time I first learnt to weave, in the early 1970s, the Polish weaver Magdalena Abakanowicz was creating her monumental woven structures known as ‘Abakans’. There was a blockbuster exhibition of her work recently at Tate Modern. It made me think about how the acceptance of art in her medium, weaving, has regressed from that time. Sure, there are unlimited art forms accepted now, combinations of traditional arts with digital technologies, conceptual art etc. However, the craft skills that had no boundaries and led to the work of textile fine artists, like Magdalena Abakanowicz, Sonia Delaunay and Shelia Hicks being accepted in the fine art world, now seem to have reverted into compartmentalised textile crafts, more often shown in America than the UK. Is that because we still think of textile arts, as cottage industry crafts rather than potentially fine art? When applying for exhibitions I often find people suggesting the café rather than the gallery. That’s not practical, my weaving is usually too large and not good placed near food smells. What does that say? Could it be that we accept craft originated art only when the person who made it has become accepted into the art world? How do they get there if they are consigned to the café or the craft gallery? There is no difference between good art and good craft, and most gallery owners know the difference. This is a plea for not pigeonholing and a thank you to galleries like MOMA Machynlleth and Gallery Gwyn for being brave and for not following the current trend.
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