Selvedge issue 81: Japan Blue, is fresh off the press and getting ready to be sent out to subscribers right now. To whet your appetite, we've decided to publish a little preview of what's inside. In this issue Caroline Burvill explores the ingenious work of master weaver Peter Collingwood, in light of the current exhibition Woven: Unwoven at The Crafts Study Centre in Farnham...
‘Use the technique so that its limitations become a help rather than a hindrance… Start with what the technique gives willingly and from those elements construct your design.’ Author, teacher, doctor of medicine, Peter Collingwood was above all a maker, who mastered the techniques of his craft to create woven art pieces to sit alongside the works of Barbara Hepworth, Bridget Riley or potter Hans Coper. As a young boy Collingwood wanted to know how everything worked, and as a mature weaver he fearlessly broke looms into parts and rebuilt them, notably creating a system of moveable rigid heddles that he used to weave graphically dramatic ‘macrogauze’ wall hangings…
By the mid sixties Collingwood was developing his Macrogauze wall hangings, using a technique that permits warps to cross each other and even move sideways. Collingwood eventually extended these into 3D structures, culminating in his vast 2 x 4.5m hanging for the Performing Arts Centre, Kiryu, Japan, in 1997, woven with a new Japanese stainless steel yarn and weighing 100kg. The next year he was celebrated as a master weaver in an exhibition at Colchester that then toured the world.
The first Anglefell was the result of an oversight: Collingwood simply forgot to beat down one side of the weft of a piece he was weaving, and rather than spend valuable time going back to correct the weave, he left it angled, and decided to proceed and experiment with these non-parallel weft lines. He found himself on a path towards a new, pared-back aesthetic, and started manipulating the lines of warp and weft in a new way, embracing the geometric simplicity of the resulting shapes.
From the Anglefells, he moved on to the next innovation, the Macrogauzes, which he made by moving segments of a number of warp threads, crossing them over so that, instead of following parallel vertical lines, the warp threads now crossed each other at different angles, creating new graphic shapes, later even three-dimensional ones. As his reputation grew, Harriet Tidball of the Shuttlecraft Guild invited Collingwood to lead a weave workshop in Michigan in 1962. This was to be the first of many regular trips to the USA. Collingwood was also approached by museums all over the world to provide an expert view on textiles in their collections...
You can read this article in full in the new issue of Selvedge, issue 81: Japan Blue.