A short bike ride from central Cambridge brings you to a Victorian village school where the pupils have long gone home and the walls now carry tapestry and ikat, made by weavers born sixty-six years apart, the eldest in 1935 and the youngest in 2001.
This is Fen Ditton Gallery, housed in the former National School that is also the home of artist and photographer Lotte Attwood. She runs it with her daughter, Hannah Munby, and since opening in May 2018 with help from independent curator Amanda Game, the pair have built a programme that feels like a well-judged family gathering, with established makers and emerging talent seated at the same table.
Ann Sutton: Invisible Cross, 1986, Hand-woven double linen cloth.
The current exhibition, Textiles Today? Three Generations of Artist Weavers, is anchored by Ann Sutton, whose career has swung between industrial design and radical installation. Bauhaus logic and the discipline of the grid run through her work, and she was an early adopter of computer-aided looms. Here you can see a recent wall piece alongside newly archived design samples and early artworks, which lets you follow her thinking from the first experiments to the finished cloth.
Left: Jacob Monk: 'ikat' Woven Paper Yarn Diptych. Right: Mary Restieaux, Woven Silk Ikat Hanging (Yellow).
The other artists link up like threads in a long warp. Jun Tomita, the Japanese kasuri master, spent the late 1970s in Britain studying with tapestry weaver Mary Farmer, whose estate contributes work to the show. Decades later, young weaver Jacob Monk travelled to Kyoto to study kasuri with Tomita himself, and he now exhibits pieces woven on a warp of hand-dyed Japanese paper yarn. Mary Restieaux, who trained under Marianne Straub, has spent decades reviving ikat while also advising Paris fashion houses on colour.
Amber Fry: Grids of Botanical Colour 2
Amber Fry dyes with plants from her Kent allotment and weaves them on a 24-shaft loom, using ikat to nudge a strict geometric grid so that neighbouring shades seem to shift against each other. Jo Barker’s Edinburgh-woven tapestries, meanwhile, chase light and painterly abstraction in wool, cotton and linen.
Eleanor Pritchard: Exclusive Limited Edition Fen Ditton Blanket, 2026.
The show also launches the limited-edition Fen Ditton Blanket by Eleanor Pritchard, available exclusively here. Pritchard responded to the Cambridgeshire Fens, where colour and shadow fade and intensify across a flat horizon, and she looked to Ben Nicholson’s reliefs, Agnes Martin and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham for company. It was woven with a Lancashire mill, with British wool in the mix. Wood artists Jim Partridge and Liz Walmsley, who work in green oak scorched to a lustrous black, have made a Restless Bench for the exhibition, giving visitors somewhere to sit and take it all in.
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Further Information:
Textiles Today? Three Generations of Artist Weavers runs until 1 November at Fen Ditton Gallery, 23 High Street, Fen Ditton, Cambridge CB5 8ST.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Ann Sutton: Spectrum Chequer, 1983, Hand-woven double wool cloth.
All images courtesy of Fen Ditton Gallery.