The Old Big School Gallery in Tonbridge is where my current touring one-man exhibition is being displayed. Thanks very much to all at Llantarnam Grange Arts Centre, Cwmbran for setting up this tour and also to all those involved at the OBS Gallery for installation, maintenance and promotion throughout. The exhibition runs until 3rd March, 2024 and I will be giving a talk/presentation on Monday evening 26th February.
Photos below show what a beautiful space the gallery is and thank you again to Russell Harper of @harperphoto for the images he took.
Interactive Tapestries as exhibited at Llantarnam Grange Arts Centre 25th July – 20th August 2022 and now available for other interested venues.
The content of the show spans just over 20 years in order to show examples of the development of my use of barbed wire in weaving followed by the inclusion of sound.
See the 3 min video below.
In this post I am focusing on my tapestries Interconnection and Metamorphosis (see below). Information and images about my use of barbed wire in my weaving can be found here and I have written an introduction to my use of sound and interaction here on my website.
Sound on this video is live from the exhibition.
Interconnection
The design for this tapestry was developed intuitively over the year it took to weave. I had the basic idea in my mind and had scribbled notes and ideas in my sketchbook, but not many details. The design is about our interconnection with the environment, both natural and man made and the conflict within that relationship, hence the barbed wire being in amongst the unspun alpaca wool at the bottom of the tapestry.
The tapestry has a 50 minute looping soundscape – a field recording of a walk I took up my local hills and the interactive audio reflects aspects of both natural and man made environments.
Metamorphosis
This tapestry is the exception to the design themes in this exhibition. Whilst all my work is a personal response to different aspects of conflict, communication and the environment, this piece is deeply personal. It is my response to the death of my parents within a week of each other in 2018.
There is a 10.5 minute looping soundscape which is composed largely of audio generated on the computer and also includes recordings of my parents’ voices. Much of the soundscape is based on the word “hello”, even the deep base rhythms come from this greeting spoken by my father. The interactive audio presents different aspects of their lives, including spoken words such as my mother’s oft used phrase “anything is possible” or the sound of their grandfather clock and an old slide projector.
So last week I delivered my interactive tapestry weaving for exhibition at Llantarnam Grange Arts Centre in Cwmbran, South Wales. I have also now set up my loom with my current tapestry on it which I will be working on during the exhibition.
The opening for the exhibition is on Friday 24th June between 5 and 7 pm and all are welcome. I will be in the gallery on Saturdays and Mondays to work on my current interactive tapestry but please confirm I will be there if you are planning on a visit and expect me to be there. The exhibition continues until 20th August.
from the PUP – Illusion on the loom
Alastair Duncan – Interactive Tapestry Weaving
Image of audio recording
Some of the tapestries are interactive through touch or proximity which will trigger audio clips, others use QR codes to link to soundscapes I have developed for those tapestries. Other pieces are interactive through touch which simply creates movement in the work itself. Come along and enjoy!
. . . but recently I was in Ireland where I was honoured to have been invited to open the Interconnections 4 tapestry weaving exhibition of Irish and Scottish tapestry artists.
Interconnections 4 at Roscommon Arts Centre
I was also asked to be the keynote speaker at the Fine Art Weaving/ Fibre Art Symposium held at the the same time.
It was all part of the Roscommon Fibre Art Festival which included another tapestry weaving exhibition by the CTA – Contemporary Tapestry Artists Ireland – at King House in Boyle.
All in all it was a most exciting return to Ireland for me after a number of years and as I was staying in a house with four other tapestry artists, we had an intensely tapestry weekend and it was fantastic.
Huge thanks and congratulations to Frances Crowe https://francescrowe.com/ and Joan Baxter http://joanbaxter.com for organising this event.
Also during this time (25th June – 20th August) I will have an exhibition of my own work at Llantarnam Grange Arts Centre in Cwmbran where many of the tapestries will be https://llantarnamgrange.com/ interactive with audio being triggered by the actions of the viewer.
Metamorphosis in action at the Heallreaf 3 exhibition.
So you have two excellent reasons now to visit this part of England and Wales and update yourself on what is happening in the contemporary tapestry weaving world in theUK and Ireland. Don’t miss out.
Two new tapestries finished and an exhibition re-opening – can’t be bad!
Firstly, the exhibition that is re-opening and running for an extended period is the Fabric of the North show at Kirkleatham Hall Museum in Redcar. It opens again on 18th May and will run until the end of 2021. My tapestries will only be there until October.
The first of the two new tapestries are “from the PUP” which will be on exhibition as part of the BTG Threads in Sheds show at Whitchurch Silk Mill from 11th September- 21st November 2021 and then Farfield Mill in Sedburgh from 5th January – 27th March 2022.
from the PUP
from the PUP – work in progress
from the PUP – detail
The second of the new tapestries is another interactive audio work for the Solway Branch of the British Tapestry Group exhibition at Gracefield Arts Centre from 11th September – 30th November 2021.
Illusion – audio interactive tapestry
Illusion on the loom
Illusion – detail
Short videos and more information about both these tapestries can be found on my Sound and Weave page.
Supported by an Artists Bursary from a-n the Artists Information Company
That could describe this past year with pandemic lockdowns and it has been stressful.
However, due to the a-n Artists Bursary and Arts Council of Wales National Lottery Good Causes funding I received, I have been able to carry on developing my work and make progress both in the area of interactivity technology (thanks again a-n) and, produce new work for exhibition and develop design ideas for further interactive work.
I am still not quite finished my Electric Brae tapestry (see previous post) as I had to break off from that in order to weave another piece for submission to The British Tapestry Group exhibition Threads in Sheds. This is another small tapestry, from the PUP, with the design based around illusion, a tapestry which I can see being made in another version on a much larger scale and with interactive sound. The tapestry needed to include silk as the exhibition is being hosted initially by Whitchurch Silk Mill in Hampshire. I hope my tapestry is accepted for this.
While I have not finished the weaving of the Electric Brae tapestry, I have managed to progress with the audio interactive element of the work, producing a manipulated audio track to accompany the work. You can listen to this on Bandcamp (headphone recommended) along with other works such as Metamorphosis, produced for my tapestry of the same name.
Further progress has been made, and this as a result of the Covid-19 lockdowns! In December/January I delivered a series of masterclasses via Zoom in designing for sound and weave. I learned as much from this as anyone else with regard to the use of Zoom to deliver workshops. Having now attended numerous Zoom sessions and held multiple meetings on that platform, I then took some very useful training in the delivery of practical workshops online.
This will come in very handy when providing the sessions I have been invited to deliver to different groups to accompany exhibitions and as part of a Summit organised by Tania Marion of Talaterra in the US for freelance educators and organisations on Perception in the Environment – Interpreting Water. Exciting stuff!
Supported by an Artists Bursary from a-n the Artists Information Company
As we go into the New Year, 2021, I have been making decisions repeatedly about how I should proceed with the tapestry currently on my loom. The design development is based on a painting by Gordon Perfect's painting "Electric Brae", held in the Scottish Art Collection at Gracefield Arts Centre in Dumfires and Galloway.
My tapestry will be part of an exhibition there by the Solway branch of the British Tapestry Group later in 2021. They invited me to take part as I come from that neck of the woods. The criteria for the work was to respond to a selected work in the art collection but not to make a copy of it.
I selected this painting because not only do I like its colours and the textures created by Perfect's handling of the brush, but also because I have a strong memory of experiencing the illusion of the phenomenon known as the Electric Brae near Ayr on Scotland's west coast. The challenge for me was to find a way of representing the original work as a tapestry whilst also referencing my own experience of the subject - hence the in depth decision making.
I am not showing my design at this stage (other than the detail above) but can say that the tapestry will have an interactive audio element to it and one of the materials I am using is conductive thread. I am being helped with this aspect of the work by the funding I received as an Artists Bursary from a-n the Artists Information Company. The rest of my time spent on the work is also funded by a Stabilisation Fund grant from the Arts Council of Wales National Lottery Good Causes.
On another note, I am pleased to say the the Fabric of the North exhibition (see previous blog post) was extended through to the end of March 2021. This is due to the fact that all galleries have been closed for most of the originally scheduled exhibition dates. Hopefully they will be able to open again before the end of March.
Supported by an Artists Bursary from a-n The Artists Information Company and a Stabilisation Fund grant from the Arts Council of Wales National Lottery Good Causes.
I just managed to fit in the installation of my two interactive tapestries to the Fabric of the North exhibition before the current Covid-19 lockdown started in Wales. The exhibition is at Kirkleatham Hall Museum in Redcar until 31st January, 2021 and outside of the lockdown in England which is starting today for a month, viewing the exhibition is by booking a time slot during their opening hours.
Until the lockdown is past you can watch the video above and also view the individual works on the Fabric of the North website.
Thanks to the Arts Council of Wales National Lottery stabilisation fund grant I received and an a-n Artists Information Company Artists Bursary award, I was able to update the touch sensitive weaving of Metamorphosis to proximity sensitivity and also update the technology used in my other tapestry in the exhibition, INTERCONNECTION.
Supported by an Artists Bursary from a-n The Artists Information Company and a Stabilisation Fund grant from the Arts Council of Wales National Lottery Good Causes.
INTERCONNECTION and Metamorphosis, my two large audio interactive tapestries were installed last week in Kirkleatham Hall Museum as part of the Fabric of the North exhibition and all ended as it should . . . after following Plan B, my backup plan!
I will soon be delivering and installing two of my audio interactive tapestries as part of an exhibition called Fabric of the North at Kirkleatham Hall in Redcar on the north East coast of England. Please click the link to find out more about the exhibition - dates, visiting times, etc.
