There is currently a fascinating exhibition of ancient tapestry alongside monumental, contemporary Jacquard-woven pieces on view in Venice.

From 4 June to 18 September 2011 the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore Exhibition Centre will host Penelope’s Labour: Weaving Words and Images, an exhibition of antique and contemporary tapestries and carpets. Curated by Adam Lowe and Jerry Brotton, the exhibition has been promoted and organised by the Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice, and Factum Arte, Madrid.

The main idea of the exhibition is to highlight Vittorio Cini’s great interest in the manual production of tapestry and at the same time explore developments in contemporary art and the renewed ability of artists to use the medium to tell very varied, compelling stories that address the warp and weft of our contemporary realities. Ranging from late 15th-century tapestries depicting the siege of Jerusalem to Azra Aksamija’s collective weaving on ethnic cleansing in Bosnia Herzegovina, Grayson Perry’s vast allegory of contemporary life in the Walthamstow Tapestry and Mark Quinn’s “flowers” of our manipulated natural world, this exhibition puts the woven image back at the heart of contemporary artistic practice.

The confluence of computer assisted weaving (in the contemporary work) and ancient hand-skills in the exhibition is intriguing to me on a couple levels. Textiles (at least historically) are often grouped by culture or technique. Here they are brought together under the category of tapestry. Even though the techniques used to realize them are wildly divergent, especially in terms of the time and equipment required to produce them, each hold within their threads very human narratives. I am currently preparing to teach tapestry (manual) in the fall and digital Jacquard design and weaving in the winter and will be encountering this confluence high and low-tech processes in the classroom. Although I can see similarities in the kinds of narratives that can be constructed using either method, I still cannot escape thinking that there is something very different in the feeling of the story that is told.

Grayson Perry | Walthamstow Tapestry. 2009 290 x 1500 cm, wool and silk | Woven by Flanders Tapestries from files prepared at Factum Arte Published by Paragon Press in an edition of 3. Private collection | image via Contessanally

I don’t necessarily think that the main difference is time as I don’t subscribe to the “more labour or time equals better” ethos, rather I think it might be explained as the difference drawing and photography. Much contemporary, computer-assisted weaving utilizes photographic imagery, meaning something like Grayson Perry’s Walthamstow Tapestry that uses hand-drawn figures, stands out. What first struck me about this work is how it “felt” more like a traditional tapestry in which there is a translation of the image as the textile is assembled thread-by-thread. In manual tapestry, decisions as to how to render this or that shape are made in the mind or hands of the weaver. The structure of weaving and the process of translation is imprinted there somehow. Jacquard weaving that uses photographic imagery has a much different feeling, as I feel that the woven structure can become incidental to the image. Here the structural logic isn’t in the mind or in the hand, but in a translation that is dictated to some degree by software design (something I am hoping to impress on students). In Jacquard weaving, the means (textile) become more transparent and the image/narrative has a kind of clarity that, well a photograph has. Like photography, there is a historical context inherent to the medium that make noticing the “how” of the work inevitable. Ultimately I feel that both kinds of textile may be called tapestry and would agree that in many ways they are the same. At the same time, I cannot help but feel that the two are also significantly different.

Read and see more about Penelope’s Labour: Weaving Words and Images on Factum Arte or on Contessanally

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