Today my good friend Elisabeth had asked me to meet her at a local art center, Silkeborg Bad Kunstcenter.
Elisabeth wanted to show me an exibition of wonderful woven tapestries by a group of European art tapestry weavers. The artists call themselves European Tapestry Forum (ETF) and the juried exibition is called ARTAPESTRY3.
And it was interesting stuff! As a wannebe-tapestry weaver I was mostly drawn to the technical aspects of the artworks, and not so much the artistic impression..
Elisabeth and I have both signed up for a two day workshop in tapestry weaving later this month, so todays expedition was kind of a study filed trip..
The colors, the size, the impact of all those very different weavings was overwhelming! I snapped some photos, of which very few were a decent quality.
I’ll just show a few, like this hanging, woven of fabric strips like our well-known, good old scrappy floormatts.
It was sooo hard not to touch the hangings, and so tempting to lift them out to inspect the backside.. We were of course thrilled when we came to a tapestry that stood out from the wall just enough for us to get a good look behind the surface:
As you can see, the back side of this very colorfull piece looks almost like rya. No weaving in ends here! Notice how Elisabeth holds tight to her hands.. We didn’t touch anything. And, because touching was not allowed (and this maybe is a bit nerdy) we simply used another one of our senses: we actually sniffed in the fabric with our noses in an attempt to find out if a certain part of a weaving was made out of silal of silk. Elisabeth even claimed that the colors had their own different smells, like in this piece woven with naturally dyed nettle yarns:
But mostly it was the use of many strands of yarn to create subtle color variations and a lively surface that was interesting to me. Like this:
Beautiful, isn’t it? I would love to be able to weave just remotely like this some day..
We also visited another exibition today in the same place. “Netmaskerne“, a group of Danish machine knitters opened their show fabolous, interesting and gorgeous dresses and robes, and of course we went to have a look.. 🙂
Beautiful stuff!!
Back home I immediately sat down to weave a bit on my pratice-tapestry:
I have to admit that I’m quite intimidated by all the colors I have to control to get the right look of the mushrooms. It’s not easy at all! But I guess I just need to remind myself that it is a practice piece, and that I’ll learn by doing (and hopefully learn a lot at the tapestry-class later this month..).