Invisible Hands: Tapestry Weavers and Artists

Summary

Haptic & Hue Podcast Summary: "Invisible Hands: Tapestry Weavers and Artists"

Podcast Information:

• Title: Haptic & Hue
• Host: Jo Andrews
• Episode: Invisible Hands: Tapestry Weavers and Artists
• Release Date: March 7, 2024

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Introduction

In the episode titled "Invisible Hands: Tapestry Weavers and Artists," host Jo Andrews delves into the often-overlooked relationship between renowned artists and the skilled tapestry weavers who bring their visions to life. The discussion highlights the intricate collaboration that transforms flat artistic concepts into textured, tactile masterpieces and examines why the hands behind these creations frequently remain anonymous.

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The Picasso Tapestries at Kaikut

Jo Andrews begins by recounting her unforgettable visit to Kaikut, a grand Beaux Arts villa built by the Rockefeller family. Here, she witnessed an impressive collection of woven tapestries depicting Pablo Picasso's work, which seamlessly blended Picasso's artistic genius with the weavers' craftsmanship.

• Jo Andrews (00:00): "I remember nothing about the conference, but at some stage I was asked if I would like to see the grand House on the hill and its art... [These tapestries] were true masterpieces."

Katrina London, curator of collections at Kaikut, elaborates on the visitors' awe upon encountering these large-scale tapestries, often unacquainted with tapestry techniques but mesmerized by their quality and vibrancy.

• Katrina London (02:51): "Visitors... see Picasso's work... but they see that this is something different... they're usually amazed by them."

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Nelson Rockefeller's Role and Jacqueline de la Bohomme Durbac

The tapestries at Kaikut are a testament to Nelson Rockefeller's profound admiration for Picasso. He commissioned or acquired 19 woven tapestries that served as a retrospective of Picasso's illustrious career.

• Jo Andrews (05:11): "Nelson Rockefeller... commissioned or acquired 19 woven tapestries of Picasso's work as a sort of retrospective of his career."

The creation of these masterpieces was a collaborative effort with Jacqueline de la Bohomme Durbac, a master tapestry weaver. Over two decades, Jacqueline meticulously translated Picasso's paintings into woven forms, ensuring each piece retained the essence and vibrancy of the originals.

• Jo Andrews (09:58): "Jacqueline de la Bohomme Durbac... collaborated with Picasso on color choices and he always approved the cartoons."

Despite her significant role, Jacqueline's contributions remained largely overshadowed by Picasso's fame. However, recent scholarship and museum practices are beginning to shed light on the indispensable role of weavers like Jacqueline.

• Jo Andrews (13:04): "Weavers really get their credit for being the maker and the one who translated them into the tapestry medium."

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Modern Tapestry Weaving: The Dovecot Studios

Transitioning to contemporary practices, the podcast introduces Naomi Robertson, head of studio at Dovecot Weavers in Edinburgh. Dovecot represents a modern tapestry studio where a team of weavers collaborates closely to interpret and transform artists' works into tapestries.

• Naomi Robertson (16:07): "I see myself as a weaver, a craftsperson and an artist... it's a really creative process."

Naomi emphasizes the blend of artistry and craftsmanship required to adapt paintings into woven forms, highlighting the unique interaction between color, texture, and structure inherent in tapestries.

• Naomi Robertson (17:30): "By translating it into wool and yarn, it has a different quality... the wool absorbs the light and almost resonates."

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Collaborations with Contemporary Artists

The episode spotlights a collaboration between Sekai Machache, a young Zimbabwean-Scottish artist, and Ben Heimers, a weaver at Dovecot. Together, they created "Lively Blue," a tapestry inspired by Machache's abstract ink drawings and her research into the history of indigo.

• Sekai Machache (29:10): "To see it turned into something completely different... just exciting."
• Ben Heimers (31:21): "It's like translating something into another language... turning anything into the language of tapestry."

Machache acknowledges Ben's pivotal role, viewing him as a co-creator rather than merely a translator of her designs.

• Sekai Machache (32:45): "I think that Ben is the artist of this tapestry... it's important to credit people."

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The Art vs. Craft Debate and Collective Recognition

Celia Joyce, director of Dovecot Studios, addresses the longstanding debate distinguishing art from craft. She advocates for recognizing tapestry weaving as a high form of art, emphasizing the collective effort behind each piece.

• Celia Joyce (24:21): "We see tapestry as the embodiment of how, as a team, you can create something that's beautiful."
• Celia Joyce (25:17): "It's important to record the individuals... but it's also about the collective act."

Celia highlights the challenges in gaining individual recognition within collective projects, especially in a society that often lionizes the "hero artist."

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Conclusion: Recognizing the "Invisible Hands"

The episode underscores the vital yet often invisible role of tapestry weavers in the art world. By transforming artists' visions into woven representations, these skilled craftsmen and women add depth, texture, and longevity to artistic expressions. As appreciation for their contributions grows, the hope is that the tapestry of art will increasingly acknowledge and celebrate the "invisible hands" that play an essential role in its creation.

• Sekai Machache (33:37): "It's important to credit people... I wouldn't want to forget the people who made the work."

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Final Thoughts

"Invisible Hands: Tapestry Weavers and Artists" offers a comprehensive exploration of the symbiotic relationship between artists and weavers. It highlights the necessity of recognizing the collaborative nature of tapestry creation and calls for a broader appreciation of the craftsmanship that underpins some of the world's most cherished artworks.

For more insights and visuals of the discussed tapestries, visit www.hapticandhue.com.

Transcript

[Jo Andrews]

Foreign.

[Katrina London]

Welcome to Haptic and Hughes Tales of Textiles. I'm Jo Andrews, a hand weaver interested in what cloth tells us about ourselves and our societies. Often the stories and information that textiles give us are ignored, and we lose a whole dimension of human experience. And far too often, the hands that create the textiles we treasure remain unknown and anonymous. That's very much the case in this episode where we look at the relationship between artists and tapestry weavers. It's the weaver's hands and skill that transform an artist's ideas into tapestry and often translate it into something special, textured and tactile, with a depth that is unique. And yet it is the famous artist whose name is attached to the piece and the weaver who is forgotten. I want to understand why this has happened and if it is changing. Some time ago, when I lived another life with a job that asked me to get on clothes and think about the problems of the world, I was invited to a conference at a Center about 30 miles outside New York City. I remember nothing about the conference, but at some stage I was asked if I would like to see the grand House on the hill and its art. It was an incredible collection of painting and sculpture, the kind that lifts your heart even when you're suffering from appalling jet lag. And there was something truly special there that I'll never forget. A long gallery in the house was filled substantially with extraordinary woven tapestries, rendering the work of Picasso into something new and exciting, somehow transformed from flower flat canvases into images with much greater texture and density. To my eyes, they were true masterpieces.

[Jo Andrews]

And visitors do have that impression that you had as well. Those who are familiar with Picasso immediately recognize that it's Picasso's work, but they see that this is something different, and they are not usually aware that he was involved in tapestries, and so they're usually amazed by them. They're very striking, brilliant colors, and it's great to see their visitors eyes widen in amazement as they turn the corner into the gallery. And even if they're not that familiar with tapestry techniques, they always marvel at the high quality of the weaving. The visitors who are the most blown away by the tapestries are often very reluctant to leave. One Frenchman who visited even said he wanted to spend the night there.

[Katrina London]

That's Katrina London, who's the curator of collections at Kaikut, which is the mansion the Rockefeller family built themselves high above the Hudson River. It was members of this family who helped to found the Museum of Modern Art and New York's Cloisters Museum, which displays Medieval art. So with money and taste, the Rockefellers also filled their own home with fine pieces.

[Jo Andrews]

Kaikut is a four story Beaux Arts villa that was built between 1908 and 1913 as a country home for Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller Sr. And his wife, Laura Spellman. It's located in Tarrytown, New York which is about 25 miles north of Manhattan. And it's perched high up above the Hudson river with astounding views. The house is home to four generations of the Rockefeller family, and the first three generations in particular left a mark on its collections, which include highlights such as English and American furnishings, antique channel Chinese and European ceramics, significant portraits, 18th century French prints, and exquisite woven textiles.

[Katrina London]

In particular, Nelson Rockefeller, Governor of New York and later Vice President of the US Under Gerald Ford, loved the work of Pablo Picasso. And he commissioned or acquired 19 woven tapestries of Picasso's work as a sort of retrospective of his career.

[Jo Andrews]

So the tapestries depict some of Picasso's most notable paintings from over 50 years of his career, from his early Cubist works of the first quarter of the 20th century, such as Girl with Mandolin and Harlequin, to a more ominous scene, Night Fishing at Antibes, which was painted on the eve of World War II. And then some more jubilant depictions in the south of France after the war, like Nude on the beach with Shovel. Three of the tapestries were actually based on paintings from Nelson Rockefeller's own collection. He owned Interior with Girl Drawing Pitcher and Bowl of Fruit and Girl with Mandolin. And then four of the tapestries were based on paintings that the Museum of Modern Art had in their collection. Harlequin Three Musicians, the Studio and Night Fishing at Antibes. The tapestries are all much larger than the original paintings. Some are as large as 9 by 12ft. So they're really like mural size.

[Katrina London]

Nelson Rockefeller was a man who could afford the actual paintings of Picasso. So why did he commission so many tapestries?

[Jo Andrews]

We don't know the exact stated reason that Nelson commissioned such a large amount of these tapestries, but it has been noted that it allowed him to really display almost like a small retrospective of Picasso's career transformed into another medium, which I think was exciting for him. They were also less valuable and fragile and much more poor portable than paintings. So they would lend themselves to changing installations and locations, which appealed to Nelson because he had a real passion for art installation and he loved to move works in his collection around, frequently trying out new placements. Also, another possible source of inspiration, or at least appreciation of tapestries as a medium he, he grew up around some of the best tapestries in the world. His father, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Who was a philanthropist, displayed the incomparable unicorn tapestries in their 54th street townhouse before he donated them to the Cloisters in 1937. So Nelson's father was a great lover of medieval art. He was one of the founders of the Cloisters, and his mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, was a major patron of modern art. And, and so it's kind of interesting that the Picasso tapestries sort of marry these two traditions in a sense.

[Katrina London]

There's little doubt that Nelson Rockefeller loved his Picasso tapestries. He took many of them to the Governor's mansion in Albany, New York. Katrina says he really wanted to show them off and share them with others, and he was happy to lend them freely to museums and galleries.

[Jo Andrews]

One last anecdote about Nelson's reception of the tapestries is that he wrote a touching thank you letter to Picasso in 1970. He writes, quote, it would be difficult to express fully the joy and excitement of anticipation that I continue to have in living surrounded by these masterpieces, end quote.

[Katrina London]

If you ever get the opportunity to see these tapestries, please do it. They're simply incredible. But this story raises a whole host of questions for me about hidden hands. Nelson Rockefeller wrote his letter of thanks to Pablo Picasso. When visitors see these works of art at Kaikut, they immediately recognize them as Picassos. But it was not Picasso who made these tapestries. They were not worked by his hands, and it was not him who labored over a 20 year period to finish this commission. Very few of us will ever have.

[Jo Andrews]

Heard her name, so she is Jacqueline de la Bohomme Durbac. She was born in France in 1920 and she studied at the Academy Julien in Paris, where she met her husband, Rene Durbach. He was a sculptor, painter and designer of tapestries and style stained glass. Jacqueline studied sculpture for three years and then she trained in low warp tapestry weaving with the Aubusson master Beaudonnet. And then she set up a studio in Cavalier, France, in the Var region. And there Jacqueline began to weave her own designs, also designs by Rene, and then began making weavings after cubist masters. And then each Picasso tapestry that she made took her between three and six months, depending on the complexity and the size. And Picasso was living nearby in the south of France, and he collaborated with the weaver on color choices and he always approved the cartoons. And then the final, he gave Jacqueline permission to weave three identical versions of each composition. So the first was meant for Nelson Rockefeller's collection, the second was for Picasso himself, and the third would remain at Durbach's manufactory.

[Katrina London]

So here is someone who spent 20 years of her life in close collaboration with Picasso, producing something that extends his art and transforms it into another medium. But she remains unseen. Well, almost.

[Jo Andrews]

The designs of the tapestries are certainly by Picasso. His name is woven on the front of them in block letters, very visible. But the weaver Jacqueline de la Bohomme Durbac is also attributed on the face of the tapestries with her trademark symbol, which is an A within a c. So technically, they're co signed. But of course, everybody always sees Picasso's name first and doesn't necessarily know what the A in the C is. But during tours and in our labels and text panels in the galleries, the weaver really gets her credit for being the maker and the one who translated them into the tapestry medium. And so our museum educators definitely talk about this during the tour. But I think you're right that a lot of people just see them as Picasso and they're confused about the whole commission and the collaboration and how it all came about.

[Katrina London]

But Katrina says in some sense, Jacqueline's hands are incredibly visible as it is her work you're looking at when you see the tapestries.

[Jo Andrews]

So we try when we're sharing with visitors to talk about how important her role is. And, you know, I think for a long time, her artistic career was sort of in the shadows, and many people just dismissed the tapestries as copies and not so important.

[Katrina London]

But importantly, Katrina thinks those shadows may be clearing a little.

[Jo Andrews]

Yeah, I do think it's changing. There's been a good deal of new or recent scholarship on modern tapestries and the vogue for them at mid century and all the different players in that realm and the makers. And I've heard murmurings of, you know, maybe exhibitions will be organized that involve Jacqueline de la Bohomme Durbac or feature her. So I think things are finally starting to change.

[Katrina London]

The close relationship between a tapestry weaver and an artist isn't unique to Picasso. Marc Chagall, the Russian French artist, had more than 40 of his works transformed into luminous works of tapestry by the Belgian weaver Yvette Coquille Prince. They had a close personal relationship, so much so that Chagall's wife Vava became intensely jealous and banned Yvette from from chagall's company for 10 years. Chagall called Yvette the Toscanini of tapestry. And she said of herself, I'm like a conductor, and Chagall is the Music I must understand the work of Chagall so profoundly that I myself do not exist. But how do modern tapestry weavers see themselves? As craftspeople like Yvette aiming to disappear, or as artists in their own right? Naomi Robertson is the head of studio at Dovecot Weavers in Edinburgh. She manages a rare modern tapestry studio of six weavers who work to a mix of commissions and speculative pieces, which they hope to find a buyer for.

[Naomi Robertson]

I see myself as a weaver, a craftsperson and an artist, I think, as a weaver. And because we're a studio weaver and because we're weaving alongside each other, the technical needs to be constant, so everybody needs to be able to weave in the same manner. So that's very important. But then I think the interpretation of somebody's work that we bring to is very much an artistic. We're looking at color, we're looking at mark making, and in each different project, we have to find the weaving solutions for that person's work. So we're not copying paint marks, but we're finding solutions in our medium for it. So I think of it as a really creative process. So I think of myself as an artist and a craftsperson.

[Katrina London]

Naomi herself is a gifted weaver. I love her rendering of a painting of Joan Eardley's called July Fields. Eardley was a celebrated Scottish painter of the mid 20th century, and Naomi has given this work a depth and texture that transforms a beautiful painting into a different art form.

[Naomi Robertson]

So by translating it into wool and yarn, it has a different quality. In something like a painting, the light reflects on that surface. If you weave it, the wool absorbs the light and almost resonates, you get a much richer feeling. And I think we all probably also connect with textiles in a way. So I think there is a kind of living relationship with a textile and a tapestry, but there's definitely a depth of colour. And I think a lot of that, again, is to do with the way that we mix colours. If you wove with a flat, perfectly dyed, matched colour, the tapestry would look very flat. And one of the things that we pride ourselves on is the mixing of yarns on the bobbin, which really brings the colour to life. And often it can have something quite unpredictable in that mixture that just makes a color ping.

[Katrina London]

There's something deeply alluring about modern tapestry weaving. Painting is largely rendered on top of a canvas or paper, but here the image is the fabric, the surface and the structure deeply entwined and embedded within each other, which gives these pieces, when they're successful, a depth and integrity that are Unmatched as a studio, Dovecot has a number of weavers, and each of them might work on the same tapestry. This is very different from being a lone weaver on your own. You work in a much more collaborative way with your colleagues.

[Naomi Robertson]

At the start of a project, we do a lot of sampling. We work out a palette, we work out the mark making. So we're all coming at it from the same place. And weaver wouldn't necessarily sit on the same spot on a tapestry. We might move across from one bit to another. You might pick up somebody else's bobbins. And we do a lot of talking while we're weaving. I might say, oh, I like that color. What's the next? It's all talking to each other. While we're talking, so is the tapestry. So it is a constant kind of conversation that's going on about what's happening to Naomi.

[Katrina London]

This is a conversation amongst the weavers themselves and then between the weavers and the tapestry, which speaks to them.

[Naomi Robertson]

I think so. And, yeah, it's all embroiled up in one. Your whole life is embroiled in the tapestry you're weaving. As you're weaving it, you know, you weave in your worries, you weave in your happiness. It all gets woven in because you're living it at the same time.

[Katrina London]

And when she looks at a tapestry she has helped to weave, Naomi remembers what was happening in her life at that time.

[Naomi Robertson]

Absolutely. It's quite scary how I remember things, because I remember what was happening in my life at the time that I was weaving it. I mean, you live and breathe it for so many months, and you have good days and bad days, and it's all very much, excuse a pun, but interwoven. Yeah.

[Katrina London]

Dovecott Studios over the years have worked with many famous living artists and translated their work into tapestry. These include David Hockney, Eduardo Paolozzi, Elizabeth Blackadder, Yinka Shonabari and Kay Fassett, to mention a few. The pop artist Archie Brennan, of course, started as a weaver at Dovecot. And at the beginning of each new project, there's an interesting dialogue between painter and weaver.

[Naomi Robertson]

I suppose at first you're in awe, but you very much, I feel, quickly become an equal. Once you get down to that artistic conversation and it's just two people or whatever round the table, you are equals, and you're just discussing how to get to the right place with that tapestry. And it's just such a wonderful thing when you get down. And they respect us because they have to trust us with their work. So trust building. Is probably one of the first hurdles to get over once you've got that relationship established. But trust, because they are putting their work in your hands, they're putting their name to that work, so they need that reassurance that you're going to represent their work in the best way possible. And then you get down to things like colour and mark making. And, you know, in an artist's work, there are marks. They didn't make that happen. So it might be a paint splash, it might be a pool of water, it might just be a scrape. And they're often not aware of them, but they make their work. You know, they are part of the work, but we have to decide which of those goes in or doesn't. So things that are made by, you know, the flick of a hand or a spot of paint and are incidental, we have to make the decision to put them in. Do you make more of that mark? Do you make less of it? If you took them all away, it wouldn't be the artist's work either. So when you make an artist peer into their own work in the way that we do, they do see it from a different perspective, because we start at the bottom and work up again. An artist would never start at the bottom of a canvas and work up. So, again, they are looking at a strip of their work at a time. So, you know, it's quite interesting.

[Katrina London]

I love the idea that the tapestry weavers can help the artists see their work through new eyes by really looking at it. All the pieces that dovecot finishes are marked with the artist's name. And also importantly, dovecot's own symbol of. Yes, a dovecot. For a long time, I thought this was deeply unfair and that the individual weavers should get equal billing. But Celia Joyce, who's the director of Dovecot Studios, has a different view.

[Celia Joyce]

Dovecot Studios is a studio tapestry workshop. So we see the team as a team, and often a tapestry can be created as a collective endeavour. And I think that's where we see our place in modern contemporary tapestry. And it's exciting to work on collective projects. And I think as a society, we're not always as good as we need to be about talking about an achievement that is made by a number of people. It's not just one person who makes something successful. So we would like for tapestry to be seen as the embodiment of how, as a team, you can create something that's beautiful. There's a vision that a team can have as a team.

[Katrina London]

Celia says that all of Dovecott's pieces do contain some record of who worked on it.

[Celia Joyce]

On every work that the studios create, the initials of the team members who've worked on it are recorded, along with the dovecot symbol and the initials of any artist or designer that came up with the original imagery that's been interpreted. We recently contributed to a study day at the Borrell, which is the famous tapestry collection created in the late 19th, early 20th century by William Burrell. That's in Glasgow. That's reopened. And at the Burrell study day, the historians of the Renaissance, even earlier medieval tapestries, were talking about their challenge in not knowing that detail, not knowing who had actually worked on different tapestries. They could tell the story studio, but not the individuals and how many individuals and what that story and that journey was. So it is important to record the individuals. But equally, going back to the point about collective endeavor, it isn't always the will of the media, sometimes the museums and the galleries, to want to represent the collective act as opposed to the hero individual. And that's interesting.

[Katrina London]

She's right. It is interesting. And in contemporary society, with its emphasis on individual celebrity and freedom, the hero artist is routinely lionized over the work of a team. It seems, too, that textile arts are often by their nature collective or teamwork. Think of linen production or wartime quilt making in Canada. And because many of them have been traditionally the work of women, does it mean that their names are more likely to have been subsumed within the team? But there is also the hard economics of life for a studio like Dovecot. A buyer is far more likely to pay the price it costs to create a new tapestry if it's by a famous artist rather than a studio collective.

[Celia Joyce]

So it would be nice to think that the economics of what we do are made more viable through clever choices in terms of who we work with with. But alongside that is the opportunity to cross fertilise the funding that we have to work with an artist that might be emerging. So in the last couple of years, we've provided opportunities for our weaving team themselves to come up with their own designs. It's not always the case that they would weave their own designs. And then we've come up with opportunities to work with emerging artists, and we've supported that.

[Katrina London]

On the day I was at Dovcot, they were cutting off a completed tapestry that was the result of working with just such an emerging artist. Sekei Machache is a young Zimbabwean Scottish artist. Cutting off days are times of celebration and moments of anticipation. Finally, a work that has been planned and then executed over long months, can be seen. Often the artist is there to see what the weaver has made of their art, as Seke was there to see the work called Lively Blue, inspired by her abstract ink drawings taken off the loom.

[Sekai Machache]

It's really exciting. It's kind of surreal actually, because I just remember making this ink drawing alongside all the other ones that I was making years and years ago, this 2019, 2020 sort of time, and to see it turned into something completely different, but, you know, with so much of what the original has, it's very. I don't know another word apart from just exciting. And it is a bit surreal. Like it feels like they've really, really captured it.

[Katrina London]

But she says there is also something extra seeing her work in a new medium.

[Sekai Machache]

Yeah, definitely. There's new textures, there's new dimensions of colour, there's things that I wouldn't have been able to do with just the ink on paper. There's just so much density to it and so much intricacy and detail.

[Katrina London]

The piece is a kaleidoscope of different bright blues against neutral colours. And the original ink drawing is a work that stems directly out of Sekai Muchache's interest in indigo.

[Sekai Machache]

And I'd been sort of investigating the history of indigo in lots of different cultural contexts, but particularly related to the transatlantic slave trade and the ways in which indigo was traded alongside many other commodities such as sugar and tobacco and so on. And I decided to focus on indigo specifically because I was looking at the colour blue. I felt like one of the things that is missing from our conversations a lot of the time around the slave trade is the reason for it. And it's about extraction, really. It's about extracting commodities and selling them and trading them around the world and utilizing those commodities to create wealth. And in doing so, there was this exploitation of labour of African people. So for me it was about looking at the commodity to understand the trade, to understand the history. So I went specifically with indigo because I was already working with the colour blue.

[Katrina London]

There was just one weaver of lively blue Benheimers. He suggested making this work to Dovecot.

[Ben Heimers]

I'd seen Sakai's work at Stils Gallery and remember saying out loud, like to anyone passing by, that that would make a really nice tapestry, which is obviously probably my want to go around and look at stuff like that. It's almost like a ready made tapestry design, if you like. It's got such a nice connection to cloth generally, and also just the weight of the lines and the shapes that are made In Sakai's drawings are sort of naturally made shapes of tapestry. Just something about it, look at it and thought that would be a pleasure to weave. And it has been, it's been a joy to weave.

[Katrina London]

Ben sees his work as being about effective transformation.

[Ben Heimers]

I describe myself as a craftsperson rather than the artist. It's like translating something into another language. You can't just do it perfectly word by word because it wouldn't actually make sense. You have to get the essence or the idea of the whole sentence or paragraph or metaphor across. And that's kind of what you're doing in the tapestry situation is turning anything to some extent into the language of tapestry, hopefully.

[Katrina London]

But interestingly, it is the artist here, Sekai Machace, who sees Ben as her co creator.

[Sekai Machache]

This is a collaboration and I think that Ben is the artist of this tapestry. I am the designer of the image and a very like, important aspect of my practice as an artist is collaboration. I actually collaborate with people all the time. Yeah, there's a whole group of people that are involved in making my work all the time with me. So I've never really felt precious about anything in the sense of I know what I bring and I invite people to support and work with me all the time. So in this instance it's kind of an extension of something I'm already doing in my own practice.

[Katrina London]

And as an artist with a different, more collaborative method of working and working in lots of different media, including film. She too rejects the notion of the hero individual, the famous single name that stands above all.

[Sekai Machache]

I don't think that's a fair way to work. Like I feel that crediting people is really, really important. I've been working to make sure that Ben's voice is really, really heard in the process of making this. We've been making a film which is gonna hopefully be part of the exhibition sort of process and everything. And it's gonna go on my website and it's. Yeah, interviews with Ben talking about the process of making this. Interviews with me talking about the process of making the ink drawings and the overall ink drawing project that I've been working on for a few years now. So it's important to me that Ben gets to speak about this because this is hours and hours of work and I think exploitation of labour is something that I'm talking about in my work already and I wouldn't want to, you know, forget the people who made the work.

[Katrina London]

Partly the problem here is the age old question of why we see painting and sculpture as art and working with fibre and thread as craft, but to me these pieces are a high form of art and every bit as worthy of the name. Lively Blue, the beautiful piece designed by Sekei Machache and woven by Ben Heimers, is for sale at Dovecot. If you have deep pockets. Thank you to both Sekai and Ben for letting me pastor them with questions on a big day. Thank you too to everyone else at Dovecot Studios who weaves in that beautiful place and helps to keep it going. Pay them a visit if you're in Edinburgh and if you can't get there, there are always Jacqueline de la Bohme Durac's fantastic translations of Picasso's work at Kaikut on the Hudson river in New York. Thank you to Katrina London for sharing her knowledge and expertise of them. Haptic and Hugh is hosted by me, Jo Andrews and produced by Bill Taylor. It's an independent production supported entirely by its listeners who bring us ideas and generously fund us via Buy Me a Coffee or by Becoming a friend of Haptic and Hugh. This keeps the podcast independent and free from advertising and sponsorship. It also brings you extra content every month with a separate podcast called Travels With Textiles hosted by Bill Taylor and me, where we cover a whole range of different textile subjects. You can find out more about this episode and see pictures of the tapestries we've Talked [e-mail]. listen series 6 we'll be back next month with a mystery book that lies in an ancient cathedral. It contains everything you might need for a good life at the end of of the 1300s, including some wonderful recipes for creating brightly coloured fabrics and banners. Join us next time on the first Thursday of the month and until then, thank you for listening and enjoy whatever making you are doing. SA.