Painting with Wool: The Woven Worlds of Miriam Sacks
“I have often been asked what made me begin doing this work I call tapestry ~ Tapestry meaning a fabric fully strong: not transparent and as Lurcat calls it, a true hide. I do not use a loom to weave but merely a needle which is my brush and with which I paint and weave with freedom over a plain canvas.”
- Miriam Sacks
With these words, Miriam Sacks articulated a position that remains radical: tapestry not as a revivalist craft, nor as mural substitute, but as a mode of painting with wool.
City by Night, 1967
Opening this March, Painting with Wool: The Tapestries of Miriam Sacks at Sworders’ Cecil Court gallery in London (2–27 March 2026) revisits a practice that persistently bridged fine art and textile. Working directly onto canvas without cartoons or preparatory weaving plans, Sacks built her images through horizontally structured layers of thread, varying densities to create massed colour and tonal gradation. Vertical threads and stitches were then introduced, catching and binding the surface into relief. The result is neither embroidery nor orthodox tapestry, but a hybrid skin of wool: dense, tactile, light-absorbing.
Daisies, 1974
Her encounter in 1956 with The Lady and the Unicorn at The Cloisters proved catalytic. Yet unlike the millefleurs backgrounds and narrative clarity of the medieval originals, Sacks pursued what she called “woven images” that oscillate between figuration and abstraction. Trained in social anthropology at the University of Cape Town, she approached thread as both material and metaphor: strands interlacing like cultures, histories and technologies.
Emergent Africa, 1964
The technical intelligence of her method lies in its slowness. To build colour through thread is to reject the instantaneity of paint. Wool does not blend; it accumulates. Light sits differently on its surface, sinking into matte fibres or catching on raised stitches. Sacks exploited this resistance. In works exploring mechanisation and “Man as Machine”, straight lines and elongated panels press against the inherent softness of yarn, setting up a productive friction between the industrial and handmade. Elsewhere, in evocations of water, shells or seasonal change, she creates rhythm across the surface. A style developed and indebted to her early musical training.
Waterlilies Receding, 1982
Exhibited widely in Britain and beyond, including at Kettle’s Yard and the Victoria and Albert Museum, Sacks’ work often hung alongside leading ceramicists and weavers, situating her within a broader conversation about post-war craft. Her refusal of the loom remains significant. By substituting needle for shuttle, she collapsed distinctions between weaving and stitching, between image and cloth. The hand’s “imperfection”, as she insisted, generates infinite textural possibility — a reminder that in textile practice structure and expression are inseparable. To paint with wool, then, is to think in threads: one over, one under, one beside another — an incremental grammar in which meaning is built through structure itself.
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Further Information:
Painting with Wool: The Tapestries of Miriam Sacks is on show now at Sworders’ Cecil Court Gallery, London, until 27 March 2026.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Miriam Sacks, New Worlds, 1967. Courtesy of Janet Sacks & Angela Dymott.
All further images courtesy of the artists estate and Sworders Cecil Court Gallery.