'Boundaries?' Conference, Bristol

The full programme for the forthcoming postgraduate conference 'Boundaries? New Histories of Art, Architecture and Design' is now available here. I will be giving a presentation on Dovecot's participation in Claire Barclay's quick, slow (2010).

Tapestry element in progress, for Claire Barclay's quick, slow (2010)

Upcoming Pairings Conference

More details about the forthcoming Pairings conference in Manchester are now available here.

Cardiff

My recent tapestry road trip finished with a day at the Graham and Kathleen Sutherland Archive at National Museum Wales, Cardiff. The archive was a rich source of Graham Sutherland tapestry designs and I was helped by their AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award student Rachel Flynn, who is studying the archives. It was such a good opportunity to chat with someone who is interested in the same research area, and also a chance to share our experiences of the AHRC CDA process.

Buried in the archive was an intriguing note written by Sutherland. It had originally been archived with correspondence relating to Sutherland's design for the Coventry Cathedral tapestry, but we were able to re-date it to the 1970s. In it, Sutherland gives Fred Mann, Master Weaver at Dovecot Studios, very specific information about the colours used in his design for Form Against Leaves, woven in 1976. In it he writes:
'The question of tone or value (weight) of tone. It is important that not only should the colour be rights but that the weight of tone, one next to another, should be very exact.'
As far as I am aware, it is the only piece of existing correspondence in which Sutherland gave instructions to Dovecot's weavers regarding their interpretation of the tapestry.

Unfortunately, I do not have a good image of the tapestry, but here is a snapshot of a transparency:

Oxford

Next stop on my recent trip was Oxford. I had arranged to go and see a set of tapestries at St Catherine's College, with my parents in tow. They were designed by Tom Philips and woven by Dovecot in 1979-1980. There are six tapestries in total, featuring Latin quotations and emblematic depictions of wheels, references to the way in which St Catherine was martyred. The tapestries were commissioned for the dining hall in which they are situated. As with the tapestries I saw in Coventry, these are site specific. As well as being decorative, they perform an acoustic function in a room which has bare brick walls.

St Catherine's College, Oxford

I am always drawn to works of art featuring text, no matter what the medium. Perhaps this has intensified since meeting my partner, a graphic designer with a special interest in fonts. The style of lettering in the tapestries is immensely complex: different coloured letters overlapping each other.

We also had a look around the newly renovated Ashmolean Museum. The newly designed galleries are beautiful, although some cases are so crammed with items it is difficult to take it all in. The world-wide collection of textiles was fascinating and it was lovely to see so many textiles on display in one institution. I was particularly attracted to a tapestry fragment from Egypt, AD 600-700.


Tapestry Fragment, Egypt, Akhmim, AD 600-700