Katharine Swailes

Artist statement

I have worked with textiles for over twenty years, for the past ten specialising in tapestry weaving. What draws me to the medium as an artist is the constructive nature of the technique, you shape the bones of the piece as well as the external dressing, forming either flat wall work or small-scale three-dimensional pieces.

Swailes has a duality having a career that has explored historical textiles in construction and embellishment for costume in film and television. More recently she has worked for West Dean Tapestry Studio on contemporary and historical commissions in tapestry weaving. 

Swailes’ practice explores the constructive nature of textiles; she draws on a broad knowledge of historical techniques and methods evoking the substance and labour intensive nature of hand worked textiles. These look beyond the domestic domain of the medium. Works tend to be of an intimate scale. Often the works are 3 dimensional small palm sized. They either contain or evoke everyday objects through dimensions and shape that place the works in a particular contemporary situation. The objects retained or suggested with tapestry may have passed from everyday use in a short space of time, unlike the woven casing that surrounds them. Design and colour are reduced to evoke the nature of textiles as a medium, creating a fossil like quality evoking the millennia that the technique of tapestry weaving has existed unchanged in its methodology.