Deirdre Wood: straight and narrow
Deirdre Wood: straight and narrow 13 September to 25 November 2005
Front cover: Small spiral triangle in blue and yellow (Detail) Longest side 44cm. Top to bottom 37.5cm; shorter sides 43cm. Linen, spun silk and worsted wool. Inside Front Cover: Tall rectangular white-strip construction (DETAIL) 150cm x 70cm. Unbleached gassed cotton.
ISBN 0-9551166-0-0 / 978-0-9551166-0-5 Published for the exhibition Deirdre Wood: straight and narrow September 2005 Crafts Study Centre University College for the Creative Arts at Canterbury, Epsom, Farnham, Maidstone and Rochester Falkner Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7DS Text by David Whiting Book design by celsius.eu.com Photographs by David Westwood Publication of this catalogue was made possible by financial assistance from Arts Council England. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photographic or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. The rights of David Whiting to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.
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David Whiting
Deirdre Wood: structures in cloth Silk skeins being made on a wrap reel, ready for dyeing.
Deirdre Wood came to textiles quite circuitously, bringing to the discipline an integrated absorption of related crafts as well as the broader visual world of weaving. She talks persuasively about the various traditional textiles she has collected over the past few years – examples which do much to sustain her activity and inform her particular feeling for, and understanding of, the material.
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Complete circle
However, her background as a potter is another aspect of her interest in the
Outside diameter 167cm. Linen, spun silk and worsted
structure of cloth and the three-dimensional possibilities of the medium. Perhaps
Wensleydale.
it is because she came to the craft relatively late, having gained a more rounded experience of making, that she could see just what other directions were feasible, breaking away from some of the more traditional aspects of weaving. Quite simply, she has approached her craft from a very different angle.
She met her husband, the potter and writer Nigel Wood, at Berkshire College of Art and, after marriage in 1969, both went to study ceramics at Farnham School of Art. Then, in partnership with two friends, they set up Meon Pottery in Hampshire in 1973, producing porcelain, stoneware and terracotta there until the mid 80s. It was, Deirdre recalls, an idyllic life, making a domestic range of pots which they sold from the premises and bringing up two daughters with no space and no cash, but in considerable happiness. When the children were small she began to teach herself knitting, soon producing enough jumpers to sell at a nearby market. For the next decade Meon Woollens was selling work round the country and by the time recession took hold and sales shrank, she was sufficiently involved to want to take her studies further. So, in 1992, she returned to Farnham to take a degree in woven textiles. 5
Four legged
Absolutely crucial to the work she has been making since has been her study of
structure Largest dimension 220cm.
the Bamana mud cloths of Mali, in West Africa, and the strip weaving or narrow
Linen, spun silk and worsted Wensleydale.
cloth technique, the processes of which formed the basis of her degree show. In 1996 she was able, through a bursary from the Royal Society of Arts, to travel to Mali to see this work first hand. While many other cultures have used strip weaving (the making of narrow sections of cloth which are then cut into shorter lengths and joined to make larger fabrics), Wood has been particularly attracted to the exuberant decoration of these Malian textiles, which also possess a strong symbolic function. The cotton bogolanfini (or, more simply, bogolan) still have a significant ceremonial role, important to their various rituals of life and death. Painted with mud and treated with vegetable extracts, they have long been aesthetically as well as culturally prized with their bold irregular geometric designs and beautiful colouring. With Caroline Hart from the Joliba Trust, Wood travelled extensively in Mali, collecting numerous mud cloths as she went and staying in isolated villages, including the remote Dogon settlement at Tireli on the edge of the Sahara, studying the indigo clothes produced there.
Crucially, strip weaving of this type has given Wood considerable formal and constructive freedom. At Farnham she had already begun to develop one of her 7
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Square, green,
hallmarks, twisting the narrow sections before sewing the edges to make the
yellow, red and white ikat
longer structures. In this way she adds another element of construction already
construction with yellow peaks 125cm x 125cm. Worsted merino wool, spun silk and worsted Wensleydale.
implicit in the weaving process and as the work has progressed, this approach has allowed her remarkable invention, enabling her to break away from the flat surface and the straight border. By using the strip method, she has been working with components, with building blocks, which can be organised into larger, more complex compositions. These techniques, moving away from the structures of the single weave and the two-dimensional face, have been a liberation, enabling Wood to explore any number of intricate grids, snakes, waves, ripples and lattices of form and vivid colour. She has created abstract rhythms across the surface that play not only on composite patterns and hues, but on shifting light as she investigates new types of essentially sculptural relief. The varied strengths of some of her dyeing adds further surface depth. In Deirdre Wood’s hands the sense of textile as object, not simply as plane, is implicit. Her use of the ‘backedcloth’ technique, introducing the contrasting colour and pattern of a parallel joined warp to the face of the cloth, not only emphasises the counter-rhythms of her twisting method, but the quite new formats she employs, forms that, with their folds and pockets, eschew the familiar regularities of tapestry.
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Terra-cotta cross
It is tempting to compare Wood’s approach to parallel work in other mediums.
with green squares 65cm x 70cm.
It has something of the optical complexity of Bridget Riley but is so much more
Linen, spun silk and worsted Wensleydale.
humane and subtle in texture. There are elements too of Frank Stella, François Morellet, Agnes Martin and other abstractionists. Yet the inner energy of Wood’s work (consolidated by the emphasis and patterning of her selvedges) is very much her own, and its forms suggest that the rhythms might well continue beyond the edges, the ‘frame’ of each tapestry. Such visual motion has affiliations with forms of modern minimal music too, but it would be more than reductive to consider Wood’s work on a purely conceptual level. It is just as much about the way she deviates and extemporises, bending and flexing the craft processes, and the deep cathartic stimulus she gets from the act of making, from the preparation of the warp to the variance in the dyeing (for example, in the Ikat resist technique). In talking about influences, she has said how important her former work as a potter and her subsequent study of basketry (“basket making – in some ways a craft that is halfway between ceramics and weaving”1) have been to her current, equally three-dimensional, activities. But, in studying these tapestries, it is clear how the resourceful and playful designs of Mali, as well as other fabrics from around the world, have remained integral. For all her sense of innovation, Wood,
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Nineteen spaced arcs with dip-dyed details 240cm by 160cm. Linen, spun silk and worsted Wensleydale.
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Triangular blue and
like contemporary textile artists such as Stella Benjamin and Michael Brennand-
grey construction 122cm x 107cm.
Wood, has kept a close eye on history as a means of moving forward, and also the
Unbleached linen, spun silk and worsted wool.
inherent properties of the materials she uses.
Of course Wood’s combinations of different fibres – wool, silk, cotton and linen – create richly varied surfaces, from the more abraded to the lustrous sheens. But their integration also enable her to coerce and manipulate the structures she makes. In the past two years she has “entered the world of curving strips”2 where “the warp threads begin as pure linen on the broad curve and graduate towards pure silk on the tighter curve”. It is, she went on to say, “the different shrinkage properties of the two yarns that make this curve possible”. She describes the weaving method as “a bit tricky, like trying to steer a bus with loose steering!”, but this is exactly the kind of technical challenge that Wood obviously relishes. This has taken her still further away from the conventions and commitments of ‘old’ tapestry. By making strips on a curving axis she can realise quite new structures on the wall. These strips, in single hangings or larger – multiple – groups, or making up giant discs, have a fresh architectural and abstract presence that really defines the space of a wall and room. The variation of forms seem limitless and as I write Wood plans to make tripartite fan-shaped pieces, curved Malevich-like crosses and 15
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Broken circle;
more variations on the circle. She is determined to make one of these discs in a
nine pieces Outside diameter 220cm.
single weave. There is a new sense of movement in these curves, an energy that
Linen, spun silk and worsted Wensleydale.
activates and delineates space, and they show again Wood’s ability to stimulate through particular relationships of shape and colour. Notice too the motional effect of distant blurring achieved by one of her dip-dye techniques. In Wood’s work you find little of the traditional, reassuring stasis of tapestry.
Deirdre Wood communicates a real sense of passion, but it is a vocation she wants to share in other ways too. Conscious of the decline of the crafts in education, she has been keen to spread the word about textiles, and she and fellow weaver Ann Richards tour schools, colleges and village halls to discuss their skills and the art of cloth. They illustrate those talks with numerous examples and supervise practical sessions. This is yet another aspect of Wood’s optimism, her belief in a craft which seems to have endless ramifications. She feels she can take her work anywhere now.
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Deirdre Wood, quoted in “Tapestry – but not as we know it”; Textiles by Deirdre Wood. Gosport Museum & Gallery, 2003, p8.
2
Deirdre Wood, letter to David Whiting, 30 March 2005. 17
Rectangular snaked ikat construction: red, white and black with silver details 148cm x 104cm. Spun silk, cotton and worsted wool.
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Twisted chequered construction 74cm x 154cm. Silk cotton and wool.
Deirdre Wood: personal details Born London 1949 Training 1966-68
Berkshire College of Art - foundation course
1968-69
Farnham School of Art - vocational pottery course
1992-95
West Surrey College of Art and Design - BA (Hons) woven textiles
Awards 1995 Winner of the Clothworkers Foundation Travel Award from the Royal Society of Arts 1996 Textile award from the David Canter Memorial Fund 1999
Mid-career bursary from Southern Arts
2001 Year of the Artist - textile artist in residency, in collaboration with Oxfam, Hampshire County Council and Southern Arts 2003
Grant from Arts Council England
2005
Grant from Arts Council England
Exhibitions 1995
New Designers - Business Design Centre, Islington, London
1995 Royal Society of Arts Student Design Awards - Dean Clough Galleries, Halifax (an RSA touring exhibition) 1995
Portsmouth City Museum and Art Gallery
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Triangular black,
1995 Nine Makers - Winchester Contemporary Art
white and red construction with
1997
Contemporary Textiles - Winchester Contemporary Art
1997
Chelsea Crafts Fair, London
stippled pattern 94cm x 75cm x 87cm. Cotton, spun silk and worsted wool.
1998-99 Southern Craftmakers - Beatrice Royal Gallery, Eastleigh (a Southern Arts touring exhibition) 1998
Crafts in Churches - Contemporary Crafts in the Cotswolds
1999
Craft Matters ‘99 - Mitcham, Surrey
1999
Twisted Strips - Whitchurch Silk Mill
1999
Twist and Turn - Atrium Gallery, Bournemouth University
2001-02 Acknowledged Sources - Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth 2004
Reinventing the Bauble - The Hub, Sleaford, Lincolnshire
Solo exhibitions 2002
The Art of Recycling - Fairfield Arts Centre, Basingstoke, Hampshire
2002-03
Riches from Rags - Havant Museum, Hampshire
2003
Andover Museum, Hampshire
2003
Thatcham Reedbed & Discovery Centre, Berkshire
2003 Tapestry - but not as we know it - Gosport Museum & Gallery, Hampshire 2004
The Hub, Sleaford, Lincolnshire
2005
Straight and Narrow - Crafts Study Centre, Farnham 23
Exhibitions curated
Triangular black, white and red
1997 Mud in the Making - Malian textiles and the work of four contemporary potters (Svend Bayer, Jonathan Garratt, Mick Pinner and Patrick Sargent), Winchester Contemporary Art
construction with
1999 Down to Earth - exhibiton of textiles and photographs of Mali with ceramics by Jonathan Garratt, Guildhall Gallery, Winchester
Cotton, spun silk and worsted
stippled pattern (DETAIL) 94cm x 75cm x 87cm. wool. Back cover:
Professional affiliations
Small spiral triangle in blue and
Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
Member of Contemporary Applied Arts
yellow (Detail) Longest side 44cm. Top to bottom 37.5cm; shorter sides 43cm. Linen, spun silk and worsted wool.
Acknowledgments Deirdre Wood would like to thank Professor Simon Olding for giving her the opportunity to exhibit at the new Crafts Study Centre, Farnham and critic and author David Whiting for kindly agreeing to write the catalogue essay. For all their support and help: Robert Martin of Arts Council England; John Gillett, Director of the Winchester Gallery; Kris Morrison, Kate Groombridge and Ann Richards. For the superb photographs and design of this catalogue, David Westwood and David Hyde. Finally she would like to thank her husband Professor Nigel Wood for his unstinting support and encouragement. 24