Review of ‘Tapestry Today’ Exhibition – Hebden Bridge Arts Festival July 2006

It’s clear from the techniques used that each artwork has taken weeks, if not months of labour, and yet all the tapestries have a wonderful freshness and vivacity – as if they’ve grown out of the weave overnight.

The range of subjects, textures, ideas, techniques and scales is fabulous, and yet the exhibition manages to have a strong overall coherence. The curators have done a fabulous job of collating such a strong representation of tapestry in the UK today. There are artists from Devon to Orkney, Northern Ireland (the only man in the exhibition) to Lincolnshire, Loch Broom to London, and everywhere in between.

The breadth of themes in the tapestries is amazing: landscapes in a whole variety of weathers, moods and techniques; still-recognisable natural forms within an abstract framework; and pure abstract pieces experimenting not only with fabulous colours, but also textures that make you want to nuzzle them!

Ros Bryant – one of the curator/exhibitors – found out I am a writer while letting me loose on the sample loom. She told me some tapestry artists keep their entire design in their heads and then create the finished piece – no matter how large – line by line. She equated it with writing a novel without making any character or plot notes – just starting to write at line one and keeping on writing till the end without any revisions allowed. I found that analogy mind-boggling! – and made me even more respectful of the work on show.

If you want to see a brilliant – and brilliantly diverse – collection of tapestry at the height of its game, then book this exhibition into your local venue. It is truly inspiring – whether you are already involved in textiles, or, like me, a complete outsider.

Hats off to the British Tapestry Group, I – for one – will be lobbying our Arts Festival to make sure we have the pleasure of more of their work next year

The grafting of he and she

He designed gardens.
Wrote his plans in loops
of copperplate as exuberant
as twines of wisteria.

A century on, his borders long-choked,
his zen-raked paths vanished,
she finds his diagrams.
His careful block-planting
for massed colour, his knots
of box, his yew walk (to hide
the compost heap).

And she allows his gardener’s fingers
to grow again, bloom
through these subtle petal-pages
of her tapestries.

Flock rising

Inside this prison are birds
rising in a silver cloud
from peat-black marsh.

My barbed spikes
beat into the barred sky
to the bang of the orange drum
to the crack of the rubber bullet.

These ciphers are my hands

moving over months to tease
out messages; to semaphore images;
to translate emotions to the morse
code of waft and weft.

Unleashed

My weft writes from left to right,
each shed a different parting of my hair.
These silken threads I have grown
since born, till yesterday; till,
tripping on the thick rope of them
once too often, I decided.

I shear them from my scalp, they lie
– a passive gold – heaped on the stone flag.
In this early dawn, my fingers
tremble on the loom’s warp as if
at the strings of a harp. My bare head
is a hayfield prickling with stubble.

And I give myself
to the weave:
to form this beach;
these glints on the loch;
this single light – in your eye.