Demons, Yarns & Tales is the title of a exhibition that took place in November 2008.
Christopher and Suzanne Sharp founders of the rug company invited a group of internationally renowned artists to explore a medium foreign to their usual practice, we were asking them to take a voyage into the unknown, leaving their area of comfort to work in unfamiliar territory. The medium was that of Tapestry; a lost art made redundant by the sheer expense of its production and non-compliance within a world impatient to conform to the ease of mass-production in an era of convenience. The art of Tapestry and the knowledge of its craft faded long ago in much the same way as the magnificent tapestries themselves disintegrated.
The exhibition was an experiment within this lost world and addresses themes of translation and transformation. The works pose visual and tactile questions concerning the translation of meaning. Three years in the making, the exhibition reveals the shifting transformation of each artist’s unique visual style from his or her known medium into the uncharted and the unknown. Initially, the physical medium itself becomes apparent and appears engaging and challenging. The artist is preoccupied with technical matters: unfamiliar colours, the texture of the material, the properties of the different 'threads' and the complexity of the weave. Then, as the work develops, the new medium begins to contribute to, rather than compromise, the finished work; giving birth to a thoroughly contemporary art form, evolving naturally from its historical past. The handwoven setting proves itself to be an alternative 'soft' canvas; warm, tactile, able to represent ideas and images on a vast scale, both in terms of imagination and physical presence.
The artists that participated in the project are:
Kara Walker, Grayson Perry, Batriz Milhazes
Fred Tomaselli, Ghada Amer & Reza, Gavin Turk, Jaime Gili, AVAF, Paul Noble, Julie Verhofen, Gary Hume, Farancesca Lowe, Shahzia Sikander, Pater Blake
Kara Walker
Peter Blake
Shahzia Sikander
With the exhibition came a beautiful book. With an introduction by Sarah Kent .
I would have loved to see the exhibition, luckily I have the book. The Tapestry are all all amazing. It's very impressive to see the transformation from one medium to the other.
read this extract from sarah kents introduction :
"With its infinitesimal variations on the colour grey, Paul Noble’s minutely detailed drawing must have presented an almost impossible challenge. Then there’s the problem of how to achieve diagonals and curves; because a tapestry is made from interlocking vertical and horizontal threads, it is virtually impossible to create curving or diagonal lines that don’t have a stepped profile. With its fleet of triangular shapes aligned on the diagonal, Jaime Gili’s painting could have been made for the express purpose of testing the weavers’ ingenuity. And with her web of interlocking arcs and circles, Beatriz Milhazes must have created similarly intractable problems. Yet in each case, the weavers have managed to produce clean, sharp outlines that, to the naked eye, appear absolutely fluent – not a zig-zag in sight! The weaving house making the tapestries is in China, where this is not a traditional craft. The company was set up only ten years ago and employs the Flemish weaving techniques used by the famous tapestry makers of Aubusson. It takes a long time to produce each tapestry partly because of the intricacy of the work, but also because the factory is situated in a rural community north of Shanghai and the weavers, all of whom are women, work part time so they can be free to help in the fields and gather in the harvest."
I've been very touched by Kara Walkers Tapestry "A warm summer Evening in 1863" it's based on a engraving first published in a newpaper; it shows rioters burning and looting an orphanage for colored children in New York. As the flames take hold, black children flee the building only to be met by the angry mob. The scene is partially hidden by the silhouette of a hanged woman - the victim of a lynching.
The incident happened in the civil war during the draft riots. The whole scene is incredibly cruel yet very beautiful and on the medium of tapestry it get utterly confusing.
visit the Demons, Yarns & Tales website www.bannersofpersuasion.com
