Kara Walker’s
A W arm
Sum m er E ve n in g in
1863
adapts an image
from
H a rp e r’s P ictorial
H is to ry o f
the C iv il
W a r
depicting racially
motivated violence.
H STREET, .NEW TURK CITY.
his N obson series o f draw ings, from w hich his
Villa Joe
tapestry
is based, in close pencil strokes.
“ T h ere was a lot o f attention paid to color accuracy, as I know
that dealing w ith grays w ith natural dyes is particularly difficult,”
N oble says. “ I spent ages w ith some photographic printers making
a color-accurate photograph o f one panel o f the drawings, because
they w ere sent a really huge digital file o f the drawing. T h ere’s not
necessarily accuracy for sending color information digitally because
o f different machines’ com patibility.”
Like many o f the artists involved, N oble created the tapestry
design as a series o f pixels w hich helped him to pick out detail that
might otherwise be missed. T h e final tapestry, though, is a blown-
up section o f his original drawing, as some details from the Nobson
series are too tiny to translate to the loom.
“ I was starting with large mountainous shapes and then smaller
and smaller boulders and stones and then pebbles and then finally
I was just stabbing the paper w ith an etching tool, just making in-
dents’” he says. “ M y tapestry vocabulary is pretty aw ful, but they
had to scale it up to get all the detail in.”
T h ankfu lly, the Sharps’ tapestry vocabulary is better than
N ob le’s, and these 14 tapestries rendered by novices but made
by masters hold together as a show and as individual w orks.
“ I am really happy w ith the results and they are just beautiful
things,” Christopher Sharp says. “ T here is a lot o f talk about the
credit crunch and the art world taking a hit, but I think that people
are becom ing increasingly interested in things that they can see
and understand, things that are less conceptual. W ith tapestry,
it is art but it is also craft. You can appreciate the synergy that has
gone into it from the artists and the sheer w ork from the crafts-
people as w ell.” *
G im m e M ore!
bannersofpersuasion.com
The exhibition was at the Dairy in London November 10 -22,
and at the Loft in Miami, Florida, December j
- 6
.
feb/niaro9 american craft 05^
