IN A SPIN: WEAVINGS OF TERESA HASTINGS
Text by Clare Lewis
Trained as a weaver at London’s Central School of Art, alongside winning a Craft’s Council award, Teresa Hastings was cherry-picked by Jack Lenor Larsen, an internationally known textile designer, author, and collector, and one of the world's foremost advocates of traditional and contemporary crafts, straight from her degree show. Based at Larsen’s W84th Street studio in New York, Hastings worked on colour, dyeing, and hand-weaving sampling on a small table-top loom, surrounded by his extraordinary collection of textiles, and artisanal objects. This experience sparked in Hastings a fascination with historical craft techniques which, alongside Larsen’s talent for reaching back into the past for inspiration, continue to be hugely influential.
Image: Teresa Hastings with work Knot me: Not me, 2022 tapestry, wool, washi paper, puddled iron, 210 x 180 cm. Image above: detail of Knot me: Not me, 2022 tapestry, wool, washi paper, puddled iron, 210 x 180 cm.
A trip to southern India in 2016 proved equally serendipitous. While staying at an ashram, Hastings met a Vedantic monk who invited her to visit the rural Himalayan community where he ran a mentoring programme. There she was inspired by the Indigenous textile heritage. After a brief return to London to refresh her weaving skills, Hasting returned to India and the hard graft of converting a small two-room hut without electricity or plumbing into a studio before she could start work. Everything was difficult, she recalls, and without the support of Janki Ji from the nomadic Mongolian Bhotia tribe, progress would have been even slower. As well as being an extraordinary spinner whose traditional textile skills fascinated her, Hastings was shepherded, along with their livestock, between villages where they farmed fruit, vegetables, and pulses.
Through giving community talks, Hasting met Gaurav Singh, a freelance textile consultant based in Uttarakhand. Trained in Delhi on a textile design programme affiliated with Nottingham Trent University, Singh has successfully reintroduced the use of handspun naturally dyed wool, to add value to the hand knotted carpent industry that supports local artisans. “Singh has been really helpful,” she says. “Dyeing was new to me but a bit like cooking; you pick it up quickly. He helped me source materials, took me trekking for raw wool and often acted as a translator.” She continues: “Natural dyeing is a slow, frustrating process, and many things can go wrong. Results can be unexpected, so you have to be flexible. The pH value of the water on the day, the age of the dye materials, and even the pot you use can have an impact. We dye on an open fire, but because the surrounding woods are government protected, we use driftwood collect from the Ganga during monsoon or source scorched timber from trees struck by lightning.
Most of our dyes come from an Ayurvedic supplier seven hours’ drive away, or we collect leaves or flowers which grow close to the studio. We achieve extraordinary chalky colours using: Madder root, Flames of the Forest flowers, Sappan wood, and Cutch. Dried Myrobalan is particularly special, producing yellows through to greens; if left to ferment with rusting iron, it gives greys and black. I am fascinated by this slow process of uncontrolled change. The impact of rusting iron is one of nature’s mysteries; out of a worthless metal, you can achieve something of great beauty,” Hastings says. For the yarns, Hastings uses two or three different types of wool, including that of black sheep, which, she sourced by trekking to and fro across the perilous and vertiginous Himalayan landscape, something she won’t be repeating soon. The wools are processed using different techniques, including felting.
These processes are slow: short-fibre wool is used for felting, and longer wool fibres are hand-spin on the chakra into various thicknesses. “I also use nettle, a tough beast that you have to work endlessly, stripping the leaves from the stem, drying under the sun, soaking and beating with sticks,” Hasting says. Patience is needed to deal with the dramatic vagaries of nature that the Himalayas conjures, impacting every area of Hastings’ work. “Sudden storms, high winds, thunder and lightning, extreme heat and cold all are to be worked around and accepted. “Water which does not pour out of taps for days on end and electricity which regularly cuts out have to be navigated.” recounts Hastings, who has got somewhat used to working with rather than against nature. Organically processed Japanese Washi paper yarn replaces silk, which Hastings doesn’t use on ethical grounds, as it offers similar luminosity and takes natural dye beautifully. Hastings began weaving on a floor loom but soon envisaged large textile installations, which moved her towards tapestry, which she sees as a natural continuation of her practice. “I am not looking to be technically innovative; I am trying to create textiles that revert to their simplest common denominator,” she says. “Historically rusting iron has been used as a mordant, and tapestry is a medieval technique used in India, the United Kingdom and multiple other countries around the world.” It’s a continuum Hastings finds unifying, positive and cathartic. It also comes full circle with the idea of returning to the past for inspiration. Weaving those early loom-woven textiles, Hastings found the scale limiting and imagined developing larger installations within architectural spaces.
Returning from India, she brought a shipment of 200 kilos of yarns and fibres naturally dyed and processed by hand in her Himalayan studio. Three 3 x 3 metre tapestry scaffolding frames have been constructed in her London studio. Hastings is now working on three tapestries connected through strapping, felted fringing and knotting, and incorporating hammered and rusting iron, wools, and fibres in shades of Myrobalan modified by iron. She will return to India in the summer to continue here work. Taking her lead from the Indian scriptures, Hastings envisages herself as the creator of these pieces but regards nature as the enabler inviting us to question the beauty in the object, which perhaps belies the violent forces of nature behind the making of the materials. Either way, Hastings’ tapestries are the tangible culmination of Larsen’s legacy: connecting past, present, and future to find a new inspiration.
IN A SPIN: Teresa Hastings looks back to look forward was featured in Selvedge issue 113: Raw
Find out more:
@teresah_astings
Trained as a weaver at London’s Central School of Art, alongside winning a Craft’s Council award, Teresa Hastings was cherry-picked by Jack Lenor Larsen, an internationally known textile designer, author, and collector, and one of the world's foremost advocates of traditional and contemporary crafts, straight from her degree show. Based at Larsen’s W84th Street studio in New York, Hastings worked on colour, dyeing, and hand-weaving sampling on a small table-top loom, surrounded by his extraordinary collection of textiles, and artisanal objects. This experience sparked in Hastings a fascination with historical craft techniques which, alongside Larsen’s talent for reaching back into the past for inspiration, continue to be hugely influential.
Image: Teresa Hastings with work Knot me: Not me, 2022 tapestry, wool, washi paper, puddled iron, 210 x 180 cm. Image above: detail of Knot me: Not me, 2022 tapestry, wool, washi paper, puddled iron, 210 x 180 cm.
A trip to southern India in 2016 proved equally serendipitous. While staying at an ashram, Hastings met a Vedantic monk who invited her to visit the rural Himalayan community where he ran a mentoring programme. There she was inspired by the Indigenous textile heritage. After a brief return to London to refresh her weaving skills, Hasting returned to India and the hard graft of converting a small two-room hut without electricity or plumbing into a studio before she could start work. Everything was difficult, she recalls, and without the support of Janki Ji from the nomadic Mongolian Bhotia tribe, progress would have been even slower. As well as being an extraordinary spinner whose traditional textile skills fascinated her, Hastings was shepherded, along with their livestock, between villages where they farmed fruit, vegetables, and pulses.
Through giving community talks, Hasting met Gaurav Singh, a freelance textile consultant based in Uttarakhand. Trained in Delhi on a textile design programme affiliated with Nottingham Trent University, Singh has successfully reintroduced the use of handspun naturally dyed wool, to add value to the hand knotted carpent industry that supports local artisans. “Singh has been really helpful,” she says. “Dyeing was new to me but a bit like cooking; you pick it up quickly. He helped me source materials, took me trekking for raw wool and often acted as a translator.” She continues: “Natural dyeing is a slow, frustrating process, and many things can go wrong. Results can be unexpected, so you have to be flexible. The pH value of the water on the day, the age of the dye materials, and even the pot you use can have an impact. We dye on an open fire, but because the surrounding woods are government protected, we use driftwood collect from the Ganga during monsoon or source scorched timber from trees struck by lightning.
Most of our dyes come from an Ayurvedic supplier seven hours’ drive away, or we collect leaves or flowers which grow close to the studio. We achieve extraordinary chalky colours using: Madder root, Flames of the Forest flowers, Sappan wood, and Cutch. Dried Myrobalan is particularly special, producing yellows through to greens; if left to ferment with rusting iron, it gives greys and black. I am fascinated by this slow process of uncontrolled change. The impact of rusting iron is one of nature’s mysteries; out of a worthless metal, you can achieve something of great beauty,” Hastings says. For the yarns, Hastings uses two or three different types of wool, including that of black sheep, which, she sourced by trekking to and fro across the perilous and vertiginous Himalayan landscape, something she won’t be repeating soon. The wools are processed using different techniques, including felting.
These processes are slow: short-fibre wool is used for felting, and longer wool fibres are hand-spin on the chakra into various thicknesses. “I also use nettle, a tough beast that you have to work endlessly, stripping the leaves from the stem, drying under the sun, soaking and beating with sticks,” Hasting says. Patience is needed to deal with the dramatic vagaries of nature that the Himalayas conjures, impacting every area of Hastings’ work. “Sudden storms, high winds, thunder and lightning, extreme heat and cold all are to be worked around and accepted. “Water which does not pour out of taps for days on end and electricity which regularly cuts out have to be navigated.” recounts Hastings, who has got somewhat used to working with rather than against nature. Organically processed Japanese Washi paper yarn replaces silk, which Hastings doesn’t use on ethical grounds, as it offers similar luminosity and takes natural dye beautifully. Hastings began weaving on a floor loom but soon envisaged large textile installations, which moved her towards tapestry, which she sees as a natural continuation of her practice. “I am not looking to be technically innovative; I am trying to create textiles that revert to their simplest common denominator,” she says. “Historically rusting iron has been used as a mordant, and tapestry is a medieval technique used in India, the United Kingdom and multiple other countries around the world.” It’s a continuum Hastings finds unifying, positive and cathartic. It also comes full circle with the idea of returning to the past for inspiration. Weaving those early loom-woven textiles, Hastings found the scale limiting and imagined developing larger installations within architectural spaces.
Returning from India, she brought a shipment of 200 kilos of yarns and fibres naturally dyed and processed by hand in her Himalayan studio. Three 3 x 3 metre tapestry scaffolding frames have been constructed in her London studio. Hastings is now working on three tapestries connected through strapping, felted fringing and knotting, and incorporating hammered and rusting iron, wools, and fibres in shades of Myrobalan modified by iron. She will return to India in the summer to continue here work. Taking her lead from the Indian scriptures, Hastings envisages herself as the creator of these pieces but regards nature as the enabler inviting us to question the beauty in the object, which perhaps belies the violent forces of nature behind the making of the materials. Either way, Hastings’ tapestries are the tangible culmination of Larsen’s legacy: connecting past, present, and future to find a new inspiration.
IN A SPIN: Teresa Hastings looks back to look forward was featured in Selvedge issue 113: Raw
Find out more:
@teresah_astings
2 comments
wonderful! Sumptious shades and colours. Love it
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your blog post. It was both insightful and engaging!
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