The London Traveler

I still remember the first time I saw a really great tapestry. It was the central panel of the Lady and the Unicorn series in the Musee de Cluny, in Paris, and I must have stood in front of it for half an hour, looking at the tiny flowers in the borders, each petal and leaf neatly delineated - an amazing profusion of detail.

But generally, my generation saw tapestry as something like needlepoint - something for little old ladies, something hanging in draughty old castles or at the back of ‘Ye Olde Tea Shoppe’. Tapestry was something from a world long past.

Well, now it’s  being brought up to date. Like knitting, tapestry is being reclaimed for street cred.

An exhibition  at The Dairy features tapestries designed by artists such as Gavin Turk, Grayson Perry and Gary Hulme, as well as leading Pop artist Peter Blake.

I was immediately attracted by Fred Tomaselli’s ‘After migrant fruit thugs’, a tapestry that takes the medieval tradition of foliage borders, and places two gaily coloured birds on a bough. It’s a modern spin on the old themes.

Also adapting the floral theme is ‘The bugs and the lovers’ by Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh. But this delicate tapestry, with its watercolour-like effects, diffused fields of colour, and pastel tones, has a very different effect from Tomaselli’s striking work. Bugs and butterflies are caught in almost textbook accuracy while the huge, undefined flowers remain inscrutable. It has a curious beauty.

Other tapestries are far more revolutionary. Kara Walker’s ‘A warm summer evening in 1863′ shows the black figure of a hanging woman - hanging from a noose, or perhaps from her pigtail; there’s a big black bow on the rope - in front of a crowd scene in grey and white. Everything is monochrome, and we’re not quite sure what we’re seeing. A suicide? A lynching? It’s a disturbing work, all the more disturbing because of its restrained colour palette, and the beauty of the craftwork.

Grayson Perry’s ‘Vote Alan Measles for God’ on the other hand  is a loud, exuberant work, like a twisted kilim - therather amorphous shape of teddy bear Alan Measles, dressed in suicide belt and brandishing a machine gun, shares the tapestry with tiny details- a mullah in a window, an explosion, crucifixes, oil derricks, a view of the Pentagon. Again, it picks up on that medieval tradition of filling in the borders of the tapestry, but it fills them up with terrorism and militarism, rather than flowers and birds.

But the tapestry that really impressed me was Gavin Turk’s Mappa del Mundo.  Turk collected litter from the street - Coke cans, crisp packets, tins of Fosters - and created out of it a huge map of the world. It’s colourful, but it’s difficult to work out whether we should be inspired by the recycling of rubbish into art, or depressed at the wastefulness allegorised here - a world that has become defined by its trash. And moving on from that, the litter-map isn’t the end product - it’s been copied in tapestry, so that we are at one remove from the original.

I don’t think I can afford this on my wall at home, unfortunately. But I would love it!

Exhibition: Demons, yarns and tales

where: The Dairy, 7 Wakefield Street WC1 (Russell Square tube)

when:  11am–6pm Mon–Fri, 12–6pm Weekends, till November 22

How much: free

Photo credit: courtesy Banners of Persuasion