Let's continue the tapestry thread that started yesterday with a look at some of the pieces currently on display on the Balcony Gallery space of the Dovecot Tapestry Studios. You access it from a staircase decorated with a colourful spiralling net and, before entering, you can learn more about the collaboration between Dovecot Studios and Scottish Opera to produce the "Butterfly" tapestry for the Theatre Royal in Glasgow.
As you may remember from a previous post, the piece was inspired by Madama Butterfly and moved from an obi sash. It was designed by Alison Watt, and the project was led by Master Weaver Naomi Robertson and woven by Junior Weaver Freya Sewell.
There are several examples of large tapestries hanging from the wall of the gallery that opens onto the floor downstairs where weavers actually work (no pictures allowed in this space, sorry).
Surrealism is explored in "Tartan Scarf" (1971) woven by Archie Brennan. A leading tapestry artist, Brennan designed between the '60s and the '70s a number of tapestries creating spatial illusions.
Apart from creating visual tricks of the eye, Brennan played with one main concept – the notion that tapestry is a graphically flat surface created by a three-dimensional fabric. The work shows a representation of a textile (a tartan scarf in this case) within a textile artwork, a recurrent theme in the history of this art and a topic that he reworked after studying Medieval Tapestry and the works of Morris and Co.
"Wind Dance" (1011) by the late Wilhelmina Barns-Graham was instead commissioned by the Barns-Graham Charitable Trust after the artist's death.
The piece, celebrating the centenary of Barns-Graham's birth, was interpreted from an original screen print by Jonathan Cleaver. The rug tufter therefore offered his own interpretation of the print directly from the original work without the artist's intervention.
The most notable thing about this tapestry is the colour combination with the electric blue offering the perfect background for the artist's abstract brush marks in intense shades such as vivid red. Several wools were custom-dyed specifically for this rug in order to attain the intensity of colour and tonal depth of the original work.
The third and last example is the "Grangemouth Rug" (2011) designed by artist and environmentalist Kurt Jackson and made by Jonathan Cleaver using the compressed air technique known as "gun-tufting" to shoot the wool pile through the backing cloth.
Jackson is very much fascinated by the environment and the natural world in his works and he often includes in his paintings small commentaries on the scene depicted. Grangemouth is more known for its bleak landscapes dominated by the oil refinery and petrochemicals plant, but Jackson's painting of the local power station at night features rich and bright yellow shades and intense midnight-blues, nuances that give a sense of twisted beauty to the piece, while the soft greys of the smoke add to the tapestry a sense of movement.
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