For the last two months, I’ve been working towards the launch of a new collection of tapestries, a series I’ve decided to call “Rope and Knot”.

It’s a new collection, but the tapestries themselves are not. They were all woven over the span of three years, between 2020 and 2023. In each one, the design is comprised of winding and interlinking lines, similar to a tangle of threads or a knot of rope.

For a long time, I wove these tapestries without any real idea of what they were “supposed” to be. I thought of them as a practical exercise, a design to experiment and play around with, but without thinking about it very much. If I had to describe them, I would have called them a group of weavings that referred to the process of their own making - a line that passes over and under another line, just like the warp and the weft of the tapestry itself.

But I really never did think about these pieces very much. They were the things I made in the gaps between my “proper” work in the studio, something to pass the time or use up a spare bit of warp.

When I moved into my new home studio earlier this year, and I started unpacking all these different weavings from all these different boxes, I started to see the common thread (hah!) between them. And I realised that the “threads” in these designs didn’t really refer to the warp and weft after all. They were too hefty and substantial for that. They reminded me instead of ropes and cordage, like the mooring lines and rigging of the boats that dotted the nearby river.

Why was I weaving a rope, instead of a thread? Maybe it’s the hardiness and strength of it, outside in all weathers, while I sit indoors at the loom. Rope work is seen as the “masculine” textile craft, entirely practical and useful, whereas the feminine textiles, used in the home, are seen as purely decorative and bit superfluous.1

Was I making these tapestries to try and redress some kind of imbalance? Was I disavowing the “feminine” qualities of my work, or subverting “masculine” ones?

And the “knots” I was weaving weren’t quite right either - loops with no beginning and no end, interlinking whorls that criss-crossed in impossible directions. My designs were like the expanded diagrams you see in old weaving books, only for knots that defied the laws of physics, knots that could never exist.

I had thought I was weaving something that referred to the process of its own making. Now it seems like I was weaving something else entirely - but what that thing is, I don’t know.

Perhaps I’ll never know. Art is for asking questions, after all, instead of proclaiming answers. But it has taught me that the things we make without thinking, the things we think of as not being “proper art” will often surprise us the most. And if you find yourself returning again and again to the same motif, then maybe its your hands (and your heart) trying to tell you something.

You can read more about the Rope & Knot Collection and browse all the available works in the series on my website here.