What happens then, when tapestry weavers, who are very aware viewers of tapestry, use tapestry as source for their own tapestries? That was the basis of a Wednesday Group experiment which has culminated in a group piece which will open at a group exhibit at the Hopper House (Nyack NY), February 2006. Before describing results from that experiment, motivation and context for that co-laboration are called for.
For the past 15 or so years, on Wednesdays when they are in New York, Archie Brennan and Susan Martin-Maffei have been converting their private workspaces to host tapestry tutorials for weavers with varying levels of experience and spectacularly different backgrounds. In 2001, we named ourselves, aptly enough, The Wednesday Group and actively decided that our theretofore independent interactions had a common future. Without formally organizing ourselves, each member has offered up individual expertises in proposal material preparation, networking and gaining access to exhibit venues. In 2002, we pulled together a collective portfolio with integrating themes based upon standard technical exercises encouraged by Archie-Susan including kilim, segments from historic tapestries, supplemented with the personal projects which are the targets of on-going critiques, suggestions, identification of alternative solutions and technical resolutions all part of the Wednesday sessions. Since 2003, we have exhibited in 5 diverse locations including library and hospital exhibit spaces, art centers and textile galleries. We currently have two shows slated for 2006.
In fall 2004, The Wednesday Group took the next obvious step, determining that a co-laborative piece would complement our diverse collective portfolio. In truly egalitarian style, we formally submitted design concepts, deadline midnight 15 October; distributed them electronically; then met 10 December to describe, discuss, vote and decide. While concepts ranged from American legends, windows in a house, Norwegian deck of tarot cards, pieces of place and self portraits, we wisely settled on AnnaByrd Mays’ profoundly interesting and amazingly simple concept: [1] Take a portion of a historic tapestry – Virtually any would do -- We settled on her recommended ‘The Annunciation,’ part of an antependium from Southern Netherlands, 1460-1480 from Cavallo’s “Medieval Tapestries”.
The group converged 14 October, almost a year to the day from the conceptual design submittals, to show-and-tell results. 28 individual pieces from 15 individual artists represent highly diverse responses to the imagery, structure and history bound into that segment of a reproduction of a tapestry fragment. Figure 2 shows the boundaries of the 28 pieces woven, highlighting in red the 26 unique foci onto the original source image [2 images having been woven twice each]. Of particular interest are the focus of the imagery, their relative scales and their orientations with respect to the source image and piece:
- Focus of the images varied widely, exhibiting highly clustered as well as unique areas of concentration. One clustered area which includes 4 overlapping images is centered on the high drama hatching of the gown in the lower center left. Another cluster of 11 partially overlapping individual views begins in the hatching in the lower right and moves up to mid-image, moving right to the open door and left to the highly patterned ground behind the Virgin. The third overlap of two images, centered on the column base, represent work of a single weaver. The remaining 9 pieces focus on unique areas within the source.
- Scale, which has been normalized to the measures determined by the boundaries of the images in the pieces, ranges from areas of concentration 10 by 13 to 44 by 59; that is, the focus of the most diverse viewers differed by greater than 4-times. The smallest, most detailed view is found at the base of the column on the right. The largest view includes the open door and floor immediately to the left of the same column. The most common proportion [in this measure] was on the order of 22 by 29 – midrange between the smallest and largest.
- Orientation of images was dominated by the vertical which corresponds to the constraints of the pieces to be woven for the project: 8 inches high by 6 inches wide. Vertical orientation was retained in 17 of the 26 unique images. Six view were rotated 90 degrees from the vertical, paralleling the horizontal axis of the source. The remaining 3 views were offset from the vertical-horizontal orientations of the original imagery.
- Orientation was further manipulated in two pieces during cartoon preparation where the images were actually reversed; as if the view were from behind the tapestry, looking through the fabric.
The pieces include imagery which was directly lifted, juggled, rotated and played off; original hatching in folds of cloth reconstructed into northern lights, into script letters. The exercise gave rise to some long-intended technical excursions not previously examined because the fairly short time commitment encouraged chance taking. One design was worked upright then again, on a different scale, side-to-side to see how shape control varied. One artist took the opportunity to weave each of 8 pieces as 4-selvedge to firmly establish the technique into the repertoire. Exposed warps, contrasted with passages of single and double warp passages, demanded increased surface control. Demi-duite, long noted but never previously utilized, was discovered and pushed.
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