Penelope’s Labour: Weaving Words and Images

Penelope’s Labour: Weaving Words and Images, an exhibition of contemporary and antique tapestries, embroidery and carpets curated by Adam Lowe and Jerry Brotton and produced and organised by the Giorgio Cini Foundation in collaboration with Factum Arte, Madrid.

An exhibition of 20 large-scale works ranging from invaluable late 15th-century tapestries to Boetti's hand-woven tapestries and contemporary works made by combining the mechanical Jacquard loom and digital art, Penelope’s Labour: Weaving Words and Images highlights how "woven images" are once more at the heart of artistic practice. In addition to several significant antique tapestries from the Cini Foundation and private collections, the exhibition features contemporary tapestries and carpets by Azra Aksamija, Lara Baladi, Alighiero Boetti, Manuel Franquelo, Carlos Garaicoa, Craigie Horsfield, Simon Peers & Nicholas Godley, Grayson Perry and Marc Quinn.

For centuries tapestries vied with painting thanks to the use of precious gold, silver and silk threads to weave words and images intended to enchant princes and their courts both in the East and the West. When the art of tapestry-making began to emulate 16th-century painting, however, it began a gradual decline at a time of confusion in the world of crafts. Starting from Vittorio Cini's keen interest in tapestries and the major collection of antique tapestries that he left to the Giorgio Cini Foundation, Penelope’s Labour wishes to contribute to re-establishing this art as one of the most vital and innovative means of artistic expression currently being used by leading contemporary artists. With new skills, they have been using the medium for over half a century to narrate stories from the world in which we live.

The exhibition is not only an opportunity to reassess the Renaissance tapestries in the Cini Foundation collection, including the marvellous Siege of Jerusalem (1470, wool and silk weft, 334 x 434 cm). It also showcases a very exciting group of contemporary artists who use various modern weaving techniques.

Some of the artists create hand-woven images through laborious, collective procedures. One typical example is the work of Alighiero Boetti, represented in the exhibition by an embroidered map (Map, 1978, 230 x 169 cm, Matteo Boetti Collection) handmade in Kabul by Afghan weavers in the 1970s. Another emblematic work is Azra Aksamija's Monument in Waiting (2008, hand-woven wool kilim with 99 prayer beads, 300 x 180 cm). The artist retells the story of the devastation of the Islamic cultural heritage due to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina by drawing on traditional killim weaving techniques. Monument in Waiting was hand-woven by refugees employed in Amila Smajovic's STILL-A workshop in Sarajevo. The work combines traditional kilim elements with features representing the destruction of Islamic culture in Bosnia. It has deliberately been left unfinished as a unique woven landmark made up of various memories, pending reconciliation.

On the subject of craft weaving, special mention must be made of the highly original work by Simon Peers & Nicholas Godley: a shawl woven from a precious thread rather like silk. This experimental work was made in Madagascar using threads gathered from around 50,000 golden orb spiders (The Woven Web (Trial 1), 2009, 160 x 60.5 cm, spider's web, Golden Orb Weaver). Each of the fibres used in the warp and weft is made up of 24 threads produced by the spiders. Using techniques developed hundreds of years ago and employing local workers, Peers & Godley harvested the thread by herding together and harnessing the females in the species to extract the filament directly from the spinnerets (silk glands). They then twined these threads by hand and wove them on the loom until they obtained a marvellous, extremely resistant weave. The result is a highly crafted, exquisitely beautiful object. Europeans will be able to admire this incredibly rare work for the first time, since nothing like it has been exhibited in Europe for over a century.

Other artists have turned to the Jacquard loom. Named after the inventor, this loom dates back to the early 19th century and is actually a kind of precursor of digital technology since it uses punch cards. Grayson Perry's enormous Walthamstow Tapestry (2009, 290 x 1500 cm, wool and silk, Flanders Tapestries) starts from the Medieval tapestries beloved of Flemish weavers to create a vast tormented, personal allegory of the evils of contemporary life. The artist weaves a story that is a highly subjective interpretation of the "Seven Ages of Man". Following the classic tapestry direction from left to right, he combines the Christian iconography of the Virgin Mary and Christ in confessional, autobiographical elements interwoven with the modern consumerist icons. The result is a personal, profoundly idiosyncratic woven image that becomes the basis for the "craftsman" Perry  to make further spell-binding transformations.

Marc Quinn also uses the Jacquard loom to weave his sensations and surreal orchids (Pixelation of a Hybrid, 2011, 290 x 290 cm, wool and silk; Pixelation of the Hearth, 2011 280 x 436 cm, wool and silk, Flanders Tapestries). They are modelled on the intricate abstract style of the so-called "verdure" Renaissance tapestries. But Quinn employees computerised weaving techniques to make his flowers –  livid and hyper-real, they are permeated by the odour of mortality. He sees the woven knots as being like pixels and the tapestry like the translation of a painting into sculpture starting from digital data which will form the DNA of the final image. From foetuses to flowers, from blood to wool, as we follow the development of Marc Quinn's art we realise how the path taken inevitably led him to specialise in tapestries.

Lara Baladi's collage of photographic prints on cloth entitled Sandouk el Dounia (The World in a Box, 2007, 640 x 790 cm, wool and silk, Flanders Tapestries, collage of 900 10 x 15 cm C41 photographic prints) conjures up an almost one-dimensional fresco with no perspective but full of figures and stories, like the earliest tapestries, to create her own myths from a fragmentary and global world which continually bombards us with a barrage of contradictory images. Her work recalls the earliest moving images of the magic lantern as she creates a multifaceted labyrinth of scenes from Cairo, Beirut, New York and London. Baladi draws on her cosmopolitan experience to merge the abstract patterns of Persian rugs and the moralising narratives of the European mediaeval tapestry. Archetypical female figures from Oriental myths are transformed  into Western characters –  including Charlie’s Angels –  in a vertiginous and unending game of snakes and ladders.

Another artists were chosen for their interest in the latest technological developments applied to the reproduction of tapestries. In Palindrome and Palimpsest (2011, installation consisting of a two-sided Jacquard tapestry, two video projections and a milled panel, Flanders Tapestries), Manuel Franquelo weaves various images on both sides of the tapestry and at the same time creates playful reflections of light on the complex web of coloured threads woven to form both image and surface on each side. This level of control over the weaving process has only become possible recently with the advent of powerful computerised techniques and thanks to the skill of the digital artists who work for the Flanders Tapestries at Wielsbeke in Belgium. Unlike hand weaving, all the threads are always available during the weave on the Jacquard. The subsequent layered structure is what makes it possible to weave different figures simultaneously on each side of the carpet. This is an incredibly complex operation for the human mind, but a powerful computer (with an operator who is familiar with programming) can now manage it almost effortlessly.

Craigie Horsfield, better known for his large-scale photography, has been exploring the latest innovations in digital Jacquard weaving at Wielsbeke, i.e. the heartland of the traditional art of tapestry-making. His photographic tapestries are what he describes as “total instruction”: colour is woven into a tactile experience and real materials that cannot be obtained in painting or photography. In Horsfield's works, the material presence of the woven image is at the centre of the his conception of art. As in the process of weaving itself, natural and social life in these tapestries is slowed down or dilated to reveal a different kind of temporality, in which we glimpse other worlds: an inconsistent and ephemeral cloud becomes material in a time warp. The looms weave different layers – often three layers one on top of the other – alternating the threads to control the image on the tapestry, thus avoiding dotted effects or bands usually visible when the Jacquard is used. The dimension of several layers in this method adds a raised level giving the tapestries an intricate structure with a rich variation in the weave and a set of colours with a powerful visual impact.

The exhibition also features a large installation by the Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa. Fin de Silencio ("End of Silence") is the continuation of work that Garaicoa began in 2006 and was first exhibited in September 2010 in Matadero, a refurbished former abattoir in Madrid. The installation establishes a dialogue between urban space and architecture which comments on and creates analogies with models of social organisation. Laid on a black floor, five carpets modelled on photographs reproduce the pavements of old Havana with their intricate obsolete system of names for the shops. Carlos Garaicoa has exploited innovations in the production of tapestries to transform a declamatory threatening combination of words and images into a more intimate thoughtful statement about space and urban architecture. One-to-one photographs of street paving were joined up digitally. Subsequently, these fragments became the raw material for Garaicoa and a team of digital artisans as they seamlessly bound together words and phrases, cracks and damaged parts of the pavements in a vast archives that mediates and transforms reality. Each fragment is altered typographically to create political and poetic comments.

In addition to the Siege of Jerusalem, a tapestry in the set of the Destruction of Jerusalem (c. 1470-1480) on the subject of the unsuccessful Jewish uprising against the Romans at the time of Emperor Vespasian and his son Titus (66-70 BC), visitors can also admire another tapestry and two antique carpets from private collections. The first item is a Large Leaf Tapestry (wool and silk weft 160 x 263 cm, Flanders, Oudenaarde manufactory, after 1545, Moshe Tabibnia, Milan), with images of giant leaves in dense forests. The images of plants in the tapestries of this period seem to reflect a desire to recreate the appearance and mystery of the forests, without any concern, however, for documentary accuracy. They were probably inspired by the fascinating accounts of tropical jungles that Europeans had begun discovering and exploring in the Americas and in India at the end of the fifteenth century. An incomplete mid-17th century Persian Carpet (384 x 274 cm, wool pile on a silk ground. Romain Zaleski private collection) in the style of the early Safavid period features fighting animals and mythological animals which stand out from a field densely decorated with arabesques, palmettes and scrolling vines. This carpet is probably the companion of a complete carpet now in the Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna. Lastly, a rare chance to see a Tapedi Damaschini (c.1500, 207 x 141 cm, wool pile on wool ground. Romain Zaleski private collection). This is a remarkably important item in the history of the carpet. Conserved in perfect condition, it is one of the last examples of a small but crucial group of carpets, still in the hands of private collectors, called Para-Mamluk carpets, because they arrived in Europe after Turkish carpets but before Mamluk carpets. Venetian dealers and patrons called this kind of carpet a tapedi damaschini.

The illustrated exhibition catalogue has essays by Jerry Brotton, Nello Forti Grazzini, Annemarie Sauzeau Boetti, Moshe Tabibnia, Adam Lowe and Iván de la Nuez.