It's been a while, but I have still been busy working over the last few months. I recently finished two smaller tapestries and I'm sharing the first one today.
This piece was directly inspired by a view from a walk I took on Burray a few months ago, looking across Echna loch to Scapa Flow with the road sandwiched in between and the hazy hills of the West Mainland in the distance. I was really struck by the flat, horizontal planes of texture and colour against the gentle, undulating hills and immediately felt it could make a subtle yet visually interesting tapestry.
Although I photographed the finished piece outside the gallery (in South Ronaldsay) at a different time of year to the inspiration source, the colours and landscape echoed the tapestry rather nicely.
"horizontal rhythms, Echna Loch"
size: 19 x 62.5cm (including the painted, wooden frame)
materials: cotton, linen, viscose rayon, wool.
woven at 10 warps per inch on cotton warp.
*SOLD*
woven detail: I used a mixture of handtufting, single warp and double warp weft to create textural variation between the horizontal planes.
in progress on the loom
Somewhat naively, I thought the simplicity of the composition would lead this piece to being "easier" to weave. Sadly, as the photo above demonstrates, this is not always the case! It sounds completely ridiculous, but I was stuck for a full week on finding the correct combination of yarns for the blue tones to put above the tufted "land". I think I wove and unwove that area at least 4 times!
