- Venue
- Aberystwyth Arts Centre
- Location
- Wales
A large abstract image of alizarin blue, vermillion and cadmium orange hangs on the far wall of Oriel 1, Aberystwyth Arts Centre’s main gallery. Its strokes are bold and painterly and yet it is not a painting. It is a tapestry. A tapestry of a painting. William Crozier’s Easter Day, 2009 is one of twenty works from the Dovecot Studios currently featuring in By a Slender Thread, an exhibition whose aim is to ‘celebrate contemporary tapestry and woven art’.
One wants to ask why, why has this painting been reinterpreted as a textile? Crozier made over 1200 paintings during his lifetime, each one produced in a single sitting. Was it a wish to see his work participate in a more drawn out, more labour-intensive process that encouraged him to hand over this particular piece to the weaver? And how did it make it him feel to be kept apart from the making, a watcher-on, passive? Did it change his practice; did he paint differently as a result?
Time is what differentiates weaving and painting. A paint-filled brush has an immediacy when it touches canvas. In weaving the yarns must be first dyed and then their carefully course mapped out before they can begin to find their way into the whole. And there is the machinery: the loom demands space. In the weavers’ cottages of the past, still identifiable today by their lines of tiny windows, the looms would command the entire front room. Weaving holds one still. While painting, Jackson Pollock style at least, has the potential for great gestural physicality. These self-same questions could be posed about the remaking of drawings too, such as John Bellany’s Woman with Fish, 2003. Again it is a case of slowness versus quickness. The quickness of charcoal, graphite, ink captured, caught and slowly re-envisaged into thread. Even the signature.
The colours are good. They are true. That slightly dusty yellow ochre of Craigie Aitchison’s familiar palette in Crucifixion sample no 2, 2005, is spot on. As are the primary reds and blue of Peter Blake’s Untitled series, 2012. And yet they lack that aged patina-ed quality of the paintings, particularly Blake’s, works that reflect his delight in collecting old things. These re-makings are just too new, too pristine. And consequently it is hard not to associate them with mass-market needlepoint kits – those popper-up bags comprising a needle, just enough dyed yarn and ready-printed canvas square. In the reworking of Elizabeth Blackadder’s Three Tulips, 2011, something of the tenderness has not translated. That exquisite, slightly smudgy blurring of her watercolour, as it bleeds its pigment into the paper, is not there. Lost. For all its artistry, here the touch of the artist is missing. By contrast, it is Peter Saville’s graphic design savvy that makes the re-visiting of Blake’s Monarch of the Glen, 2012 (with its title cocking a gentle snook at the conceit of homage) so successful as a textile piece. He clearly intends it to ape those paint-by-numbers sets, with their globby splodges of colour, embracing and using their context of mass appeal to his advantage.
Fortunately for Hillu Liebelt, a German artist also showing in the exhibition, her work does not have to undergo the same remorseless scrutiny of comparison. Liebelt works directly with textiles. Her tapestries begin and end as tapestries – though some, like her Winter Sun series, 2007, are framed and hung in rows like mini canvases. Her palette with its stark whites and icy blues, redolent of the snow-deep Finnish landscape of a Tove Janssen novel, needs the contrast of warm sun on wooden parquet. The soulless flat grey emulsion of this gallery floor merely serves to dull her intention – Winterlight, 2012, a construction of silk wrapped willow and Red Circle, 2011, a large wall-hung weave, only maintaining their presence because of the resonance of scarlet. Leaving, 2012, an exquisitely delicate installation of creamy silk cocoons suspended on wire, is virtually lost to the floor.
The video and sound piece that accompanies Seiko Kinoshita’s deliciously whimsical The Colour of Summer, 2012 invite us to spectate upon the experience of weaving. It is only here that we get a real sense of the clamorous noise and stultifying repetitiveness of the tasks and the patience and dexterity required to master the skill. And it is a question of mastery. For all that has been lost in the translation of paint into wool, cotton and linen much has been gained. Dovecot’s collection of tapestries is magnificent in its achievement of hue, texture and scale but mostly as a testament for the preservation of an on-going collaboration between artist and artisan. This is what By a Slender Thread manifestly ‘celebrates’ – the continuation of that age-old association of trust, which makes the handing over of a precious image, to be re-made essentially by another’s hand, safe.
