Overview
Is it art or is it craft? For Gordon Crook, the designer of this piece, and Lesley Nicholls, the weaver, a tapestry is both. The distinction is not important. In the decade or more that they have been working together, this team have produced more than twenty tapestries.
Tapestry is an ancient craft: the earliest known fragments are Egyptian and date from around 1500 BC.
To make a tapestry, wefts of different colours are woven back and forth to fill in just the areas where those colours are needed for the design. In comparison with other weaving techniques, tapestry offers the artist a lot of creative freedom. It lends itself to complex patterns, yet it can be woven on the simplest of looms. Either a horizontal or a vertical loom can be used. The oldest kind is the vertical loom – a heavy two-bar structure. The horizontal or ground loom was invented later.
Lesley Nicholls wove Red Kowhai on a vertical loom. To make a tapestry on a vertical loom, the weaver works from the back. On the wall in front of the weaving hangs a mirror so the worker can see progress, as well as a cartoon – an enlarged, colour-coded drawing of the design to follow. (On a horizontal loom, the cartoon is laid on the ground under the warp.)
Gordon Crook’s design for Red Kowhai has its beginnings in a commission he received to create a ‘specifically New Zealand’ fabric mural for the New Zealand Embassy in Mexico. Red Kowhai was one of the preliminary sketches he made. Although a different sketch ended up being chosen as the basis for the mural, Crook was still keen to use his Red Kowhai design.
Like all the works that Crook and Nicholls have collaborated on, this one took a great deal of time and effort. Crook built up his design slowly and painstakingly, playing with layers of collage until he felt it was exactly right. Nicholls’ task was then to find a way to interpret the design through tapestry. This was a bit like solving a mathematical puzzle. ‘You are often dealing with simple, hard-edged images,’ says Crook. ‘Weaving a vertical line is very difficult, for example. One has to experiment to see what works.’ (1)
Reference
(1) Slade, Colin. (1995). Web of Images. The Press 26 July.
Text originally published in Tai Awatea, Te Papa's onfloor multimedia database (1998).