But then Morris wove his tapestries very early in the morning - often on a loom in his bedroom. Would such a man (must be a man I suppose) ‘never do any good at all’ because he can’t weave and compose epic poetry simultaneously? Clearly so. This notion, this idea that such a thing as being actively poetic and throwing a pick or two should go hand in hand, and, in Morris’ words, be a required skill (or ‘he’d better shut up’), seemed (and still does a day later) an absurdity. Her husband, William Morris, reckoned one could (indeed should) be able to compose an epic poem and weave a tapestry. In fact putting together tapestry and epic poetry is a digression from the intention of the quote on the image from that text - (it was from a letter to Janey written in Iceland). This is what I feel - just sometimes - when I’m at my floor loom, if only for those brief spells when life languishes sufficiently for me be slow and calm enough to pick up the shuttles and find the right coloured yarns. It languishes next door in the room that was going to be where I was to weave, where I was going to become someone other than I am. You see, I do know a little about this world even though my tapestry weaving is the sum total of three weekends tuition, even though I have a very large loom once owned by Marta Rogoyska.
The weavers were too busy finishing Victoria Crowe’s Large Tree Group to cope with visitors. I was at the Dovecot a little while ago, but the public gallery was closed. Think of Grayson Perry’s The Walthamstowe Tapestry, a vast 3 x 15 metres executed by Ghentian weavers, a veritable apocalyptic vision where ‘Everyman, spat out at birth in a pool of blood, is doomed and predestined to spend his life navigating a chaotic yet banal landscape of brands and consumerism’. These days the tapestry can be epic once more - in size and intention - thanks to the successful, moneyed contemporary artist and those communities of weavers at West Dean and at Edinburgh’s Dovecot. Those vast Arthurian pieces by William Morris to pictures by Burne-Jones have an epic quality both in scale and in subject, but, to my shame, I can’t put a name to one. I say this glibly, but cannot name a particular tapestry where this might be so. Of course there are connections, in that for centuries the epic subject has so often been the stuff of the tapestry weaver’s art.
It made me smile, the impossibility of it. I had stopped to take one last look at the sea, where I usually take one last look, and the phone bleeped. Saturday morning and I was driving home from a week in a remote cottage on a mountain.
.jpg "epic poem")
She sent it to me as a text message, that is an image of a quote in situ, a piece of interpretation in a gallery.
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