Katharine Swailes
28 x 12 3/4 in
Further images
"My woven works grow directly from this terrain, echoing the rhythms of climbing. Each piece begins as a continuation of the last: a memory of an unrecorded green yarn, a diagonal cut that interrupts, an unnamed cotton warp that arrived with the loom and became the silent ground for the work.
"Sitting at the foot of the hanger, I weave as time passes. Spring into summer, summer into autumn, I move across the loom—left to right, bottom to top—ascending and returning, climbing again. The warp face becomes a slope; the path, revisited. The process is slow and meditative, bound to season and attention, each thread holding traces of both place and time.
"These works are tall, narrow, and sculptural—like vertical slices of hillside tracks. They are shaped by repetition, return, and the necessary interruption of change. Each carries the memory of the last while leaving room for new beginnings.
"This practice connects to a centuries-old lineage of tapestry, including seventeenth-century verdure tapestries that sought to bring the outside in. Yet where those works translated nature into decorative pattern, my weaving embraces abstraction, holding the trace of lived time and place. The ancient technique remains unchanged, linking the contemporary act of making to generations of weavers while suspending time through a meditative, sculptural process.
The resulting tapestries are not merely cloth, but spatial, sculptural objects that invite open engagement. They embody passage, structure, and the experience of landscape—simultaneously rooted and expansive, intimate and monumental—offering viewers a space to inhabit, interpret, and explore."
Exhibitions
Selected ExhibitionsCollect 2026, Somerset House, London