Tapestries

These tapestries are age-old, multi-purpose pieces of textile art, woven on looms using weft-faced weaving, where exposed warp threads are concealed at the back of the finished piece, presenting outwardly a perfect façade. Families are like tapestries, warped strands purposely hidden from sight, and only the best yarns preserved and displayed. Like families, tapestries evolve in various forms. Most curious of all is textile wall art, purposely exhibited tapestries that favourably represent genealogical histories as spectacular collections of threads woven to present each dynasty at its best.

A tapestry skilfully constructed, grand in varied colours and textures, images and patterns is powerfully alive in its narrative. Crafted by the tension-holding loom, using diverse threads of durable and versatile wool, of weighty metal threads and strong and smooth intricate silk, such tapestries are more than a piece of art to be observed as a pretty painting. Tapestries are tangible fabrics: thousands of tiny peaks and troughs invite sensory exploration, each story felt as a braille narrative.

Weavers would create textiles to an exact image by placing its template directly behind the loom. Templates were used to replicate tapestries but it was impossible to recreate exact matches, each tapestry suffering its own hand-made irregularities and flaws. To create block colours, the weft threads would travel back and forth, layering over themselves, stuck in their own corner of the story and never meeting the countless other threads that run through the piece. Alongside the untidy warp threads across the reverse of the tapestry, a mirror image of the performing façade, where colours are more intense and sharper, would provide greater clarity of image. But the frontal façades faded and dulled under the scrutiny of light, becoming a foggier version of the intended image.

We are all fibres in the tapestry of our own family histories. Generations of threads woven together over centuries creating a beautiful and confident version of each family’s story. Together, we weave the fabric, each of us layering into the image we collectively create, until each original thread is no longer recognisable, entwined and tangled with others not of our choosing.

I imagine how different the picture would be if I hooked one tiny thread and methodically unstitched it from the tapestry of my own family, unravelling it away from the fibres that hold it tight. A corrupted view, the feel of it changed, the indentation incurred by its absence interrupting the cadence of the story, spoiled and flawed by my own hands. Visible in my isolation; vulnerable to a passing breeze. There is safety in woven fibres.