'Drawing as Tapestry'

Walking along my local beach during the Covid crisis, I was struck by how the incoming waves, no matter how chaotic, washed back out in a linear direction. This seemed to occur because they came into contact with the more stable foreshore, an observation that informed a series of line-based drawings called ‘Overlap Zone'. They led to others focused on wave patterns, and on beach-front dynamics such as the formation of pebbles in the rough and tumble of a coastal location.

 

All of these works will feature in 'Drawing as Tapestry', an exhibition that captures a moment in my explorations across abstraction and figuration, and the possibilities offered by various mediums. The unifying thread is the use of ‘textile language’ as a metaphor for addressing the things I find interesting. In the ‘Overlap Zone' series, the incoming waves struck me as similar to 'weft' threads, interacting with the more stable 'warp'. Later, I introduced a broken line to reference to the visual impact of one wrapping around the other, and the historical connection between the technologies of weaving and computing. Rolling waves also mirror the spirals that result from the spinning processes used to produce yarn.

 

It was while writing my thesis on the American artist Richard Tuttle that the direction of this work emerged. Taking his lead, I came to view the interacting warp and weft threads as metaphorically representing many of the binary oppositions we perceive in art and nature, such as light and dark, stasis and movement.

​

In a world that's becoming increasingly polarised, it's revealing to probe why concepts that can be said to define each other -  it’s hard to understand one without the other – are often thought of as severed, representing opposite positions in our minds. I'm interested to explore how they are connected and the possibilities they offer for dynamic forms of equilibrium. This has taken me in many different directions, including within art history. Stylistic changes often lean, to some degree, in one direction or the other. For more thoughts on this, see Understanding dualism and why it matters and Strange attractor.

 

One transition I've looked at, between archaic and classical sculpture in Ancient Greece, shows shifts, for instance, from symmetry to asymmetry and from frontal orientations to presentations that are expressed more fully in the round. A related project was funded by an Arts Council Agility Award (for more, see here). Along the way, I imported line-based techniques from the 'overlap' coastal series, while the use of colour in the ancient world nudged me out of my comfort zone to try bolder approaches in both figurative and landscape work.

​​