Katharine Swailes artist statement

Weaving the Oudolf Field

My colourfield works investigate the meditative nature of handwoven tapestry, drawn to the long tradition of the medium, one of the oldest global technologies.  My weaving days connect me to this history, sitting as a tapestry weaver would have a millennia ago, the equipment and materials are fundamentally unchanged. I enjoy the rigorous methodical planning process, and the use of natural materials that respond to hand production. I use worsted wool and cotton yarn, all the wool yarns are dyed by myself, the dyeing is central to these works, the palette developed through visiting the Oudolf Field and taking in the overall feeling of the garden, these visual memories develop into dye recipes, mixing pigments and creating a liquid dye solution that becomes the dye bath for the worsted wools. These yarns become a family of colour for the current project. 

I use the most minimal number of woven tapestry techniques that have no shaping slits or sewing, this means the process itself is like a continual uninterrupted walk round the Oudolf Field which will grow and die back in its continual cycle of growth and decay. These colourfield works I see as herbaceous in nature like they bring the outside in while exploring the inner landscape. I work with many discontinuous wefts, the area woven at anyone time is the span of my hand approximately 9cm, this is a way of ensuring an even surface and harmonious repetition. This movement is made visible due to individual considered weft lengths plied up from seven strands of hand dyed wool, these strands are chosen from the dyed wools and one mercerised cotton to add lustre. The plied wool is wound into butterflies (a way of holding the yarn while weaving). The preparation is extensive so that once I sit at the loom the focus is putting the weft through the warp developing a meditation that creates a visible calm path for the eye to navigate with its ever changing minute detail hidden in the surface. 

The exhibition The Five Seasons Make Hauser & Wirth Somerset

Wed – Sat, 10 am – 1 pm and 2 pm – 4 pm15 Apr - 11 Jun 2022

Presenting new multidisciplinary work by six artist-makers, each responding to the garden designer Piet Oudolf’s unique planting philosophy and celebration of the natural world.

Distinct works ranging from landscapes in porcelain, elemental forms in wood and metal to hand-woven tapestries, reveal a search for something sacred from the ordinary. Formed from deep associations to the cycles in nature, the works celebrate all that has been overlooked and yet to be discovered, intertwining the tangible with the imagined. These visual memories, themselves akin to the experience of walking in Oudolf Field at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, create landscapes one might dream of, where immersion in nature is total. As Oudolf comments, ‘It’s not what you see, but what you see in it’. Characterised by an intuitive spirit, traditional craft techniques come alive in a collective response, oscillating between large-scale vistas and microscopic details. A surreal, dreamlike place, a place stranger than nature.

Featuring Craig Bamford, Mark Reddy, Romilly Saumarez Smith, Katharine Swailes, Annie Woodford, and Annemarie O’Sullivan.