Banners of Persuasion

THE ART WORLD’S FINEST HAVE GIVEN TAPESTRY A RADICAL REWORKING, SAYS OLIVER BENNETT

With its kings, queens, lions and unicorns, one might have thought that the tapestry was an art form that went out with the chastity belt and touching a royal’s hem for luck. Yet 14 contemporary artists have recently been let loose on the craft, The resulting works — limited to editions of five, priced from £15,000, by the likes of Peter Blake, Gavin Turk, Julie Verhoeven and Grayson Perry show that the new tapestry can include anything and everything from abstraction to agitprop. There isn’t a hunting scene or a comely wench in sight.

The project was the brainchild of Christopher and Suzanne Sharp of The Rug Company, who decided to commission the art tapestries three years ago, under the title Banners of Persuasion. “We’ve been doing rugs for 10 years and thought it would be a fantastic idea to get artists to make tapestries,” says Christopher. “It’s a medium that has been neglected. In fact, it reminds me of when we first started thinking about rugs.”

The Sharps’ range of rugs is already collectable and the idea is that the tapestries will follow suit. “We thought about doing more with artists and rugs,” says Christopher. “But rugs have a limited ‘knot count’. Tapestries are sharper.” If the rug is a lo-fi YouTube video, then a tapestry is sparkling HDTV.

Rather than locating the world’s dwindling band of dedicated tapestrists, the Sharps asked their favourite YBAs and other names from around the world — including the Egyptian artist Ghada Amer, the Iranian Reza Farkhondeh, the Venezuelan artist Jaime Gill, the Brazilian collective AVAF and the Pakistani artist Shahzia Sikander — to come on board, with the stipulation that none was allowed to know what the others were doing.

For every one of the artists, it was their first time designing a tapestry. Francesca Lowe, who calls the art form “a resurrected talisman from a bygone era”, made Trumps: a picture of swirling, spectral faces. “Ifs such an old- fashioned process, with all the different coloured threads,” says Lowe. “But, at the same time, a tapestry is also a bit like a pixelated image. In that sense it’s also highly modern.”

Blake enjoyed making his tapestry, which depicts an alphabet. “I’ve always been interested in craft, and I’ve worked on rugs,” he says, “A tapestry was a natural progression.”

Perhaps one reason for the decline of the tapestry is that making one is a painstaking process. “First you do a drawing on graph paper, then you give each patch a number, then you fill it in,” says Sharp. “It’s a bit like painting by numbers — only it takes a lot longer.”

After getting the artists’ designs, the Sharps took them to China to get them woven: you can’t find traditional weavers in Europe, insists Sharp, not even in Belgium, the spiritual home of the European tapestry. “There’s certainly nowhere in the UK that we could have done this. The skills just aren’t out there.”

Over in China, the designs were stitched by a merry band of female farmers who’d work the fields then earn a bit of overtime. What did the good ladies think? “They were a little bemused by the subject matter,” says Sharp. “But they did a great job. Each tapestry has been made by hand, and that’s a very important aspect of the collection. They’re very precious.”

They are also extraordinarily fresh, maybe because there hasn’t been much of a recent tradition of tapestry-making. Yes, there is a small tapestry footnote in modern art, from William Morris, via Picasso and Matisse, to Ron Kitaj and the Italian designer Gio Ponti, but, in general, tapestries haven’t really had a fashion moment since the Middle Ages, when they acted as very posh wallpaper for the castle-owning classes.

“It’s amazing how revered they were back then,” says Sharp. “Noblemen would actually roll them up and take them to parties at rivals’ great halls to show them off.” Who knows, they might be a hit again. After all, tapestry appeals to the growing appetite for “slow” art: that is, work that demonstrates virtues such as skill, craft, permanence and material sensuality.

Not that the banners themselves are in any way a nostalgia trip. Verhoeven’s tapestry, called Far from the Madding Crowd, is a kind of manga-meets-Victoriana-weird-fesr, influenced by the spooky work of the outsider artist Madge Gill. “I was so excited by the idea of doing a tapestry,” says Verhoeven, who decided on a figurative piece full of floaty faces. “It even looks good on the back.” Perry. who has made one called Vote Alan Measles for God, calls his piece “a kind of Bayeux Tapestry of the war on terror”, with his childhood teddy bear, Alan Measles, depicted in the centre — complete with a bomb belt. “He’s the chief deity in my pantheon,” explains Perry. “God and cuddly toys have a lot in common. They’re both things that people transfer human characteristics onto.” Perry, who collects Afghan war rugs woven with images of rocket launchers, clearly took to the medium, and is already engaged upon another digital tapestry.

Turk’s contribution is a map of the world made out of pictures of rubbish. ‘Im using the highest form of craft to elevate the status of rubbish and raise questions about value,” he says. Gary Hume’s tapestry is an ethereal group of figures called Georgie and Orchids, based on one of a set of pictures known as the Water Paintings, shown in the 1999 Venice Biennale, and depicting his wife wreathed in flowers. Although a version of a painting, Hume found inspiration in a group of tapestries called The lady and the Unicorn, to be found in Paris’s National Museum of the Middle Ages. ‘I like the flatness and the vertical hierarchy,” he says, while acknowledging that “tapestries inhabit a very strange world. It’s an incredibly old-fashioned, time-consuming medium that relates to medieval grandeur”.

Paul Noble’s piece looks like the dark side of the moon. “I couldn’t even show it in my own house, as it’s so big.” he says.

Several of The Sharps’ banners have already sold, so will the collection kick off a full-blown tapestry revival? “It’s difficult to know where it’ll all end up,” says Christopher. “We hope so, of course.”

You might need a castle-sized space to show them off, but at least these works have kicked tapestry into the future — woof, warp and all.

Demons, Yarns and Tales, Nov 10-22, at The Dairy, 7 Wakefield Street. WC1