Tapestry Weaving Research Articles

Tapestry Art in Buryatia: Experience and Perspectives

The article presents the main stages in the development of tapestry in Buryatia, from the establishment of this form of art based on weaving of nap-free Buryat taara carpets in the 19th–20th centuries, to the formation of the tapestry school in this region. The consideration of the art of tapestry in Buryatia in the context of events and trends in the decorative applied art of Buryatia in the 20th–21st centuries is connected with such issues as the entry of folk artistic traditions into the system of socialist realism, the process of revival of national identity, the author’s creativity in the field of tapestry weaving. The consideration of the stated topic of the article made it possible to summarize the available information and present a more integral picture of the development and current state of this form of decorative applied art of Buryatia as tapestry, as well as to introduce new material about the work of tapestry masters at the turn of the 20th–21st centuries, to consider the significance of the tapestry art in Buryatia in the synthesis of tradition and innovation. The characteristic features of the regional school of tapestry are determined by the specificity of themes and plots, the semantics of the motives of the Buryat ornament, the original author’s style of weaving and the transfer of weaving experience from generation to generation. Furthermore, the originality of the tapestry of Buryatia is connected with the use of horsehair, sarlik hair in the technique of classical weaving. At the same time, in the process of weaving, the natural shades of the hair are preserved, which endow the woven product with a subtle color palette. The attention is paid to transfer of the experience of horsehair weaving to the younger generation. For illustrative purposes, the educational institutions in the Republic of Buryatia, in which the “Tapestry” discipline is taught. In general, the role of educational institutions in the popularization of this form of art is highlighted.

Eksplorasi Tenun Tapestri Dengan Tema Kerusakan Alam Akibat Sampah Sebagai Karya Seni Instalasi

The creation of textile art from the use of leftover fabric (patchwork) using tapestry weaving techniques as a campaign medium to invite changes in awareness and behavior in protecting the surrounding environment due to waste, on the other hand, the installation art genre can still be explored, so textile craft works may still have a need for development even though its use is not practical, considering the value of meaning and moral messages contained in the work to invite the audience to think about environmental damage due to waste. This creation uses the method of creating craft art according to Gustami, which is divided into 3 stages in the process of creating craft works, namely, first, the exploration stage includes collecting information data (field observations/observations) and extracting theoretical foundations (sources, references and visual references). Second, namely the design stage which includes pouring out ideas from the results of the first stage in a two-dimensional visual form by considering various aspects concerning the value of craft and visualization of selected alternative sketches into a detailed form of a prototype model. Third, the end of the embodiment stage, namely making it happen at the actual size along with the final completion of the work along with the packaging system and evaluation of the results of the completed embodiment.The creation of this textile craft resulted in 6 designs of tapestry weaving works, namely as follows: (1) Raising the concept of a non-realistic landscape form with the theme of natural damage due to waste as a source of ideas for visually processing tapestry woven structures combined using patchwork. (2) 3 of the 6 alternative design developments will be realized by using a patchwork material of polyester type, as well as using an earth tone reference.

Women’s Tapestry and the Poetics of Renewal: Threading Mid-Century Practices

This essay considers women’s tapestry weaving in the Mediterranean Middle East in the 1960s. At once a mode for experimental arts pedagogy, envisioned social uplift, and critical creative inquiry, the medium held possibilities for the expression– and often fusion– of artistic and social concerns. Artists’ negotiations of the tensions demarcating “fine art” from “handicraft” assumed gendered dimensions in art schools and studios, where weaving’s association with the feminine was often reinforced. Women designed and wove tapestries through innovative collaborations and formed a constellation of interconnecting textile and design practices. While dynamic in their confluences and divergences over time, these modernist practices and affiliated artistic networks have been overshadowed by the work of male-dominated lineages. Focusing on the poetics of renewal and “new blood” explored by artists Safia Farhat and Etel Adnan, this essay threads personal and conceptual practices and approaches underlying women’s tapestry production.

Locating Ruptures Encrypted in Gender: Developmental and Clinical Considerations

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this article is to encourage reflection about children and adolescents who are expanding gender expression in this contemporary cultural moment. More specifically, to consider how relational rupture and its affective counterpart, grief, may become encrypted in gender. Attachment theory’s articulation of the intricacies of loss, in combination with psychoanalytic and systems theories, will serve to parse out the complex and paradoxical communications within this potentiality. Toward this end, my clinical process with five gender nonconforming children and adolescents will be discussed. The clinical section forms a tapestry weaving between similarities and differences in the expression of gender within the fabric of an attachment relationship. To link the clinical process to a larger cultural discourse, this article brings literary voices into the conversation, including Carson McCullers’s in Member of the Wedding and Jennifer Boylan’s memoirs of life in two genders and other writings. These sources crisscross/queer developmental time lines, disciplinary mediums, culture, and family dynamics to open up an inclusive conversation about gender subjectivity. The therapeutic process, with particular emphasis on the importance of play, is linked to advances in developmental science. Thinking with the children who vary the expression of gender can potentially inform our conceptualization of gender development, more generally.

Woven Narratives: A Craft Encounter with Tapestry Weaving in a Residential Aged Care Facility

For six months, a tapestry artist/researcher moved her studio into an aged care home to conduct a participatory art project. Drawing on ethnographic-based qualitative approaches, narrative inquiry and researcher-generated photographs, this arts-based research textually and visually documents the impact of introducing the studio-based craft activity of participatory tapestry weaving into an aged care environment. As well as highlighting the joy of creative collaboration and of learning a new skill, this project explores how tapestry weaving facilitated the understanding of the participants’ worlds through stories and reminiscence. This paper also disseminates that craft, as a practice and method, connects materials, ideas and people through engagement, and facilitates wellbeing. Given rapid population ageing, and the fear and stigma surrounding aged care homes, this paper argues that craft practice might help demystify and connect aged care with the broader community, as well as enhancing residents’ quality of life.

An Ekphrastic Review of Ilona Pappene Demecs and Evonne Miller's "Woven Narratives: A Craft Encounter with Tapestry Weaving in a Residential Ages Care Facility

The visual poem, “The loom,” is an ekphrastic response to Ilona Pappne Demecs’s article “Woven Narratives: A Craft Encounter with Tapestry Weaving in a Residential Ages Care Facility.” By drawing words and phrases from Demec’s article, the author wove a word tapestry, in a technique learnt from a child in a South Auckland primary school in New Zealand.

Participatory art in residential aged care: A visual and interpretative phenomenological analysis of older residents’ engagement with tapestry weaving

ABSTRACTAs a creative occupation, craft making is increasingly recognised for its therapeutic health benefits and positive impact on quality of life. Unfortunately, many older people in aged care have limited opportunities to engage in meaningful creative occupations, with research reporting residents are bored by the limited and stereotypical leisure pursuits. Using participatory design approaches (co-design and co-creation), this longitudinal participatory art research explored residents’ experience of actively participating in craft production. In this study, a professional tapestry artist moved her practice into an Australian aged care home for 6 months to invite residents to collaborate in designing and weaving a large tapestry based on the ‘meaning of home’. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis in combination with researcher reflections and a visual essay, we describe how three residents experienced the project in different ways: gradually, partially and fully engaged, experiencing ‘flow’ through weaving. Two superordinate themes emerged (creative anticipation and the connecting loom), with researcher-produced photographs visually conveying, comparing and contrasting how these three residents experienced the participatory art project. These findings highlight the link between a creative occupation, such as tapestry weaving, and cognitive, physical, creative and emotional well-being in old age for these aged care residents.

The Weaving of a Tapestry: a Metaphor for Teacher Education Curriculum Development

Teacher educators rightfully dream of delivering inspiring programs to benefit future teachers and the students they will in turn inspire. However, in the current teacher education environment in Australia, the artisan’s craft of weaving rich texture and producing a masterpiece is potentially over-shadowed by the educational administrator’s continual focus on the mapping of professional standards to produce an accreditation-worthy product. Responding to increased accountability, teacher educators at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, embarked on re-developing programs utilising a process akin to tapestry weaving. This metaphor enriched contributors’ understanding of the complex process of teacher education program re-development and it reflected qualities associated with the emergence of a tapestry, including artistic blocks and changing perspectives, agendas and anticipated outcomes.

Hamlet's dramatic arras

The suspense of Hamlet 3.4 has everything to do with what is behind the arras. Summoned to Gertrude's closet after staging The Mousetrap, Hamlet hears a noise behind the arras and, assuming it to b...

Preserving image and structure: tapestry conservation in Europe and the United States

Tapestry weaving has been used for millennia to create fabrics in which the design is integral to the structure, but the term 'tapestry' is also synonymous with woven pictorial hangings, the subject of this paper. Since the first tapestries were made, they have been cleaned and repaired. As the loss of warp and weft yarns affects both the image and the structure simultaneously, tapestry restoration and conservation techniques have sought to clarify the image as well as support the structure. This paper analyses the evolution of tapestry conservation techniques in western Europe and the United States from the universal use of reweaving to the range of treatments currently employed.

Nuvisavik: the place where we weave

In 1970 a small group of young Inuit women in Pangnirtung on Baffin Island began to tell a story - a story about their past, their culture, their lives - a story told through woven pictures. The first book dedicated to the art form of tapestry weaving, Nuvisavik shows how weaving became a bridge between nomadic camp life and life in a permanent settlement. The tapestries, meticulously woven by women trained by their mothers as seamstresses, portray images wistfully remembered by elders in the community and captured by local artists. Both the drawings and the tapestries convey the pride of the Inuit in their culture. The tapestries are presented against a rich cultural and historical context. Two of the essays in the book are based on interviews with elders and reflect the colourful history of the Cumberland Sound, where sustained contact between Inuit and Americans and Scots began as early as the mid-nineteenth century. The cultural content of the tapestries is discussed by members of the Inuit community, decoding otherwise enigmatic and puzzling images. A wonderful blend of art history and cultural history, Nuvisavik will entertain the scholar and art collector as well as readers with a special interest in the history of the Canadian North. Contributors include July Papatsie, a well-established artist from Pangnirtung who brings his personal background and knowledge of his culture to his writing; Deborah Hickman, a tapestry weaver herself, who was general manager and artistic advisor to the Pangnirtung Tapestry Studio from 1980 to 1983; Cathleen Knotsch, a researcher who specializes in issues pertaining to the Canadian Eastern Arctic; and Maria von Finckenstein.

The Fatal Wound of Hector, According to a Drawing by Peter Paul Rubens Designed for Tapestry Weaving

The Fatal Wound of Hector, According to a Drawing by Peter Paul Rubens Designed for Tapestry Weaving

The fatal wound of Hector, according to a drawing by Peter Paul Rubens designed for tapestry weaving.

According to the Iliad(Chapter XXII, Verses 322-329), Hector, while fighting his last duel, was almost entirely protected by bronze armor, with only a small area "where the clavicle marks the boundary between neck and thorax" exposed. It was precisely into this area, "the shorter way to death," that Achilles thrust his lance. This fatal wound, although covering Hector with blood, allowed the victim to pronounce a few words. In designing the Story of Achilles, his fourth and last series of drawings especially designed for tapestry weaving, Rubens depicted Achilles stabbing Hector near the midline of his neck. There is evidence that Rubens was always well acquainted with the literary sources of his pictures. It is also likely that he became familiar with contemporary editions of the Iliad that were enhanced with commentaries. Realizing that the wound depicted in his original drawing should have prevented Hector from speaking, Rubens altered the scene, then showing the lance piercing the cervical vascular bundle. The careful scrutiny for literary accuracy that was typical of Rubens' artistic behavior did not prevent an additional minor imprecision in the final tapestry. Nevertheless, his outstanding expressive power enabled him to give form to a gigantic baroque representation of the death of Hector in masterly fashion.

Challenging Contemporary Narrative Theory: The Alternative Textual Strategies of Nineteenth‐Century Manuscript Cookbooks

Cookies 2 eggs, 2 cups of Sugar, 1 cup of Milk, 1 Cup of butter[,] 1/2 nutmeg, 1 teaspoon of quick yeast[,] flour enough to make into a stiff dough, roll and cut out, dampen the top with water[,] dip into white sugar, then bake in a quick oven, From Sallie. -Mary Smith's cookbook, 1874 We cannot assume that a text.. tells no story because it does not make its story explicit, formally organized, and finished (that is, fully narrative); we cannot even assume that explicitness is universally a sign of full -Marilyn Robinson Waldman, On Narrative Cookbooks, relegated to the sphere and the realm of domestic economy, have long been considered inconsequential if not altogether immaterial, and certainly have never attained the status of literary text or been considered a part of the canon of American literature. And yet while they seem, as Anne Bower notes, innocent of narrative force (1), they contain an implicit narrative structure and a wealth of cultural and sociohistorical material invaluable to scholars of the nineteenth century and women's history and culture. To begin to adequately define in the nineteenth century requires a willingness to consider a variety of texts never before contemplated as literary works-including cookbooks, quilts, account books, and other cultural artifacts.' In Mythologies, Roland Barthes examines how culture can be read as a text, and how cultural artifacts or myths-everything from soap powder to wrestling matches to guide books-contain a system of signs that can be interpreted and understood both semiologically and ideologically. Barthes thus enlarges the notion of text, extending semiological and narrative analyses into realms. Comparable artifacts from the nineteenth century can also be read semiologically and narratively, including the more overtly literary texts accessible to women (particularly middle-class women) such as magazines, advice books, domestic manuals, pamphlets, fiction, and sermons, but also forms typically defined and designated as nonliterary such as cookbooks, diaries, quilts, fashion, pottery, tapestry weaving, and other arts. By extending structural, semiological, and narrative analyses into these supposedly realms, contemporary scholars of nineteenth-century culture can begin to understand more fully the myriad and complex ways that women expressed themselves, created an institutionalized network of conventions, rituals, and customs based in same-sex relations, and, significantly, developed textual strategies that complicate modern notions of narrativity. Nineteenth-century private manuscript cookbooks are explicit emblems of women's relegation to the domestic sphere, maintaining, as they did, institutionalized patriarchal systems, and serving the organizational core of that system, the family. More than just a collection of recipes or receipts (as they were commonly called), manuscript cookbooks comprised the literary text of the nineteenth-century housekeeper, playing a crucial role in maintaining communal structure, social ties, and cultural tradition. These cookbooks inscribe a narrative which figures household protagonists as protectors of domestic sanctity able to deliver the family from disorder, disease, and waste. Despite the cookbook's overtly collusive function, though, its makers reappropriated the cookbook form and transformed it into a locus of female artistry, empowerment, and social reform. The reappropriation of cookbooks' otherwise domestic function demonstrates not only women's efforts toward empowering themselves and the spaces they inhabited, but also reflects their development of alternative textual strategies that contest dominant conceptions of narrative. Nineteenth-century private unpublished domestic cookbooks are an important example of a material and socioliterary form excluded from critical scholarship by rudimentary concepts of canonicity, overly literal notions of narrativity, and limited ideas about what constitutes a literary text. …

Mantles of the Gods and Catullus 64

J.L. Sebesta: Mantles of the Gods and Catullus 6435 Mantles of the Gods and Catullus 64 Judith L. Sebesta More than halfof Catullus' epyllion on the marriage of Peleus and Thetis is in the form of an ecphrasis that describes a tapestry depicting Ariadne abandoned on Dia. Commentators have generally interpreted this tapestry as a coverlet for the marriage bed of Thetis and Peleus which is placed in a bower. The source for this setting is Theocritus' Idyll 15 ("The Adoniazusae"), which describes the marriage bed and bower of Adonis and Aphrodite that formed an important part of the ritual in the annual Adonis festival. A.L. Wheeler comments on Catullus' dependence upon Theocritus as follows: "He [Catullus] represents the ceremony as occurring in a bower of greenery which, together with the figured coverlet and glitter of gold and silver and ivory within the palace, suggests the splendors of the potentates of Asia and Egypt described for us in the Adoniazusae of Theocritus-splendors at which their subjects were allowed to gaze on festal days."1 This Idyll (15) of Theocritus recounts the visit of two Alexandrian women to the palace of Ptolemy ? to view the tableau created for the Feast of Adonis. An important part of this tableau was a figured hanging with images woven so realistically that to Gorgo and Praxinoa they seemed to be real; one of these images depicted Adonis reclining on a silver ???sµ?? (79-86). The singer of the "dirge" that concludes this Idyll gives additional details of the tableau. There are bowers (?ta?de?)2 made of fronds of dill, among which are suspended small figures of 1 AX. Wheeler, Catullus and the Traditions ofAncient Poetry (Berkeley 1964) 126. 2 The Greek ??f??« was traditionally in the form of a ?????* or a ?????, with its interior decorated as heaven. See E.B. Smith, "Architectural Symbolism of Imperial Rome and the Middle Ages," Princeton Monographs in Art and Archaeology 30 (1956) 111. A.S.F. Gow (Theocritus: Commentary [Cambridge 1950] 297) reconstructs the ataáBes as one or more canopies adorned with green dill. If this tableau is outside in a garden, he continues, the Erotes might be suspended from the branches of trees spreading over the oxidSe? under which are the images of Adonis and Aphrodite positioned as at theirbridal feast. 36Syllecta Classica 5 (1994) Erotes and eagles carrying Ganymedes made of ebony, gold, and ivory (1 19-123).3 On the ebony, gold, and silver couch are spread purple carpets (125). Gow's interpretation of the somewhat elliptical comments of Gorgo and Praxinoa in reconstructing the bower has generally been followed by subsequent translators and commentators. He argues that since the figured cloth is woven (???fa?t? 83), it is a tapestry. While tapestry weaving had been done in Greece from the time of Homer onward,4 only eastern looms were large enough to create large scale tapestries. In the Hellenistic period Alexandria was an important center of production and export of such tapestries which were described as "composed of many threads" (p???µ?ta).5 Gow interprets the text to indicate that these tapestries are hung around the tableau and do not form the clothing for the images of Adonis and Aphrodite reclining on the coverlets of the couch. The coverlets, he notes, are described later in the poem only by the word "purple." That the women are indeed commenting on figured tapestries, he thinks, is indicated by Gorgo's comment: "You would think that they are mantles of the gods" (?e?? pe????µata 79).6 Gow also argues that when the women see the figured tapestries, they have just entered the palace and have not yet pressed their way up close to the tableau. The figured tapestries, visible from a distance, must therefore be hangings. Gow understands Praxinoa's subsequent words as describing one of the figures on these tapestries as the dead Adonis lying on a silver ???sµ?? (84) for the following reasons. First, diis Adonis and silver couch cannot be part of the tableau, for the singer ofthe dirge states that the statue of Adonis in the tableau lies on a????? made of ebony, gold, and ivory (123). Secondly...

Tapestry Weaving before the Reformation: The Leiden Studios

Tapestry Weaving before the Reformation: The Leiden Studios

Lesotho Tapestry Weaving

A visitors enter Maseru, the capital of Lesotho, they are greeted by a sign that reads Kena Ka Khotso (Enter in Peace). This greeting holds special significance because here in this small, almost completely rural nation which prides itself on peace, one can witness the first stages of the development of an artistic activity unique to African art, an activity based upon cooperation within communal groups of artisans. It has only been within the last decade that members of the Basotho Nation, who inhabit the independent Southern African state of Lesotho, have begun to develop mohair tapestry weaving as an artistic industry. The medium for the craft, the aesthetic content of the tapestries, and the cooperation among the artisans all reflect the way of life in Lesotho. Since Lesotho is the world's fourth largest producer of mohair, it is natural that goat hair should provide the foundation for a native weaving industry. The country is small (30,355 square kilometers, approximately the same size as the State of Maryland), and it is