It may no longer be the days of knights and ladies of the court, or castles with cold stone walls, but that hasn’t stopped a group of artists from hand-weaving tapestries since 1993.
The Tapestry Weavers from Vancouver Island (TAPIS) will be showing a broad selection of work from 19 different artists from Parksville, Qualicum Beach, Nanoose, Nanaimo and beyond.
The work, ranging from postcard-size to more than a metre-and-a-half tall, will show a range of styles and forms, giving an idea of what local people are doing with the centuries-old art.
“It’s like painting with wool,” said Christine Rivers, one of the TAPIS weavers.
She started weaving tapestries 20 years ago, though she’s been weaving for twice that long.
“Tea towels and bedspreads and clothing and that kind of thing,” she said, describing what she used to weave. “And then I wanted to do something a little more artistic.”
Tapestry work was the outlet, said Rivers. A tapestry is made by weaving weft threads through warp threads in sections, as opposed to all the way across the work, Rivers said.
“When you’re weaving a tea towel, you throw the weft thread across from one side to the other, and then you throw it back, so it’s fairly quick. With tapestry, you’re making small designs as you go, so you have little bits of weft threads, and they don’t go all the way across. So they are discontinuous.”
That’s the technique, but the freeing part of it for Rivers is that you’re creating something that’s just an art piece, as opposed to say a sweater that could be an art piece, but also has to function as a sweater.
“If you’re doing tea towels and clothing, you’re choosing colours and things that work for that function. But you take the function out of it — now it’s an art piece.”
The TAPIS show, running at TOSH from Sept. 5 to 30, will show a range of styles — some abstract, some representational, and others that are created freehand.
One example of freehand work is a piece by Linda Wallace that she created after having a brain tumour removed, said Rivers. Leaving her with slight brain damage, the tapestry shows Wallace re-learning simple shapes at the bottom of the tapestry, and then getting into more and more complicated, organic-looking shapes.
“It’s like remembering how to weave, so it’s called the journey back,” said Rivers.
Other pieces harken back to earlier times when multiple weavers would weave a single, large tapestry based on another artist’s design.
A community tapestry started by Leola Witt and using a design from a painting by Lucy Schappy has taken about five years to make.
Another group work is the “H” words project from the American Tapestry Alliance that inspired individual weavers to create small tapestry works of words beginning with “H”.
More than 60 pieces will be shown at the exhibit, which has an opening reception on Wednesday, Sept. 6 at 2 p.m.
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