“Tactile Sensibility in Woven Tapestry”
(three day in-person workshop)
TO REGISTER:
Workshop is now full (7/26/24).
Please email Jenny Heard for additional information.
Dates/Location:
Friday-Sunday, August 2-5, 2024 @ Edmonds ArtWorks, Edmonds, WA
10:00 am - 5:00 pm each day
Class size: Max: 12
Cost:
The registration deposit for this workshop will be $200 at the time of registration. Estimated total cost will be based on the number of students enrolled ($375, based on 8 students enrolled, $275 based on maximum enrollment. In addition, there is a material fee of $10. Final payment is due during the workshop).
Class Description:
This is an incredible opportunity to learn from Sue, who will be teaching in the U.S. for the first time.
The overriding gain of this course is to hone the eye, hand, and intellect in the intricate interplay of structure, material, and design in woven tapestry. The tutor’s own quiet, minimal, and abstract works are strongly informed by the material of their construction. Whether working in linen, hemp, raffia, or paper, she talks of the ‘integrity of mark-making intrinsic to a particular thread or structure’ and her focus is to ‘make work that speaks its own vocabulary.’ These ideas will form the focus for this workshop. Participants will generate several carefully considered samples, each examining a distinct facet in the creation of woven tapestry cloth:
Structure—Using a repertoire of interlaced structures, participants will investigate ways of ‘drawing’ with the weave to explore movement, mark, shape, pattern, rhythm, tone, texture, scale, interval, spacing, or even time.
Material—Encouraged to develop meticulous attention to detail, participants will research structure through a variety of materials. The objective here is to develop an acute sensitivity to tactile articulation and subtle textural nuances.
Design—The dialogue between material, process, and idea.
By training sensibilities in both an acute awareness of structure and particularity of thread, participants will develop a heightened intuitiveness to the integration of these concepts and thus be better placed to bring greater rigour to the design content of their work. Teaching is individual, personal, and relaxed. Participants will leave with purpose and motivation to pursue their own unique woven tapestry language.
Skill Level:
The workshop is for intermediate/advanced tapestry weavers.
Materials required:
The tutor will bring a small, core selection of threads for your use in the workshop, including natural hand spun hemp from Nepal, linens, raphia, silks. ($10 fee).
Please bring:
<> Your own selection of warp threads, ideally a variety of gauges, colours, materials.
<> Any of your own weft threads that would like to use e.g. twines, raphia, linen, hemp, nettle, ramie, cotton, paper, silk, fine wire, hand spun/hand dyed wools etc.
Equipment required:
<> Strong, simple frame – at least 18” x 12”. Ideally no nails or individually cut warp grooves.
<> Small sharp scissors
<> Household fork or tapestry bobbins (whichever you like to use)
<> Sewing needles & thread
<> Flat 6” Ruler or thin lath of wood (for separating warp threads) • Sketchbook/ notebookCameraPlease bring one or two small pieces of previous work / samples
It would be interesting for the tutor and other participants to see your current practice.
About Sue:
Sue Lawty is a highly experienced artist, designer and teacher. She constructs textiles using raphia, hemp and lead, and makes drawings and assemblages using tiny stones, creating a kind of pixelated cloth.
Her quiet, abstract tapestry works are heavily influenced by a comprehensive engagement with remote landscape: the spare arid lands of mountain and desert, and notably the structure and primal rawness of rock. The work is slow, meditative, and meticulous. There is no literal descriptive element here; visual references are virtually non-existent. Lawty’s work is defined as much by absence as presence. Her works have been described as 'spiritual... meditative... a deeply contemplative experience'.
The bare warp is approached much as a painter might approach a blank canvas; nothing is predetermined. The physicality and subtleties of thread and construction are explored
intuitively and meticulously during the process of weaving. Lightness of touch and a pared down palette give importance to each nuance of mark. The artist states that she seeks an ‘understated restraint, balance, tension, rhythm: an essential stillness’ in her weaving.
Sue Lawty gained a BA first class honors degree in 3D Design (furniture) in Leeds, UK. Her final project was an impressive hanging chair based on the construction of a reef knot.
Over her forty-five-year career Lawty has undertaken many major commissions including three large woven tapestries commissioned by the Foreign Office for embassies in Ghana and Jordan. In 2013 a landmark work, 240,000 Stones, was created for Scarborough General Hospital NHS Trust. 240,000 is the number of population served by the hospital and that number of stones were collected from beaches within the catchment area of the hospital to make the 17m long artwork along its main corridor. Several location-based external commissions include a 4m high panel, Language of Lead, laser cut in Corten steel for Killhope, the National Lead Mining Museum, North Yorkshire; and Texta Texens, designed and made in collaboration with poet Helen Mort and stone mason Dan Jones. This 1 x 3m carved limestone artwork is embedded in front of the Clothworkers building in the main concourse of the University of Leeds.
Sue Lawty lectures and exhibits internationally. In 2005-2006 a twelve-month solo exhibition: Concealed, Discovered, Revealed, was displayed in Gallery 101 at the V&A, London and expanded into a notable Artist Residency and association spanning seven years. During that period, she was invited to write one of the museum's first Artist Blogs (live from 2005 – 2014); generated many outreach and education projects/ events and devised a global online community art project: the World Beach Project, which garnered over 1400 entries from all continents including Antarctica and received excellent peer review. She was also commissioned by the BBC to feature in a short documentary. A significant Woven Tapestry 'The Unsaid' and Artist's Book were acquired for the V&A's permanent Collection.
In 2014 Lawty held a prestigious Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC and the National Design Museum in New York – an experience that continues to provide stimulus for her creative thinking.
Lawty recently held a three-month IASPIS International Artist Residency in Stockholm, Sweden.
Sue Lawty is also a keen fell runner and an accomplished trekker, leading both hard mountain treks and specialist textile trips to Bhutan, India and Nepal. The book 'Earth Materials' was published in 2017 about her work.