Apparition Series by Louis Nye…
by admin
In this issue of the what’s on your loom series, we feature the works of Louis Nye, a British weaver based in Madrid. His latest works were a part of the exhibition De Cuando Jugábamos, at Galeria Silvestre, in Madrid. Louis tells us more…
Works…
Unstable Weaving
Different artists approach weaving with different focuses: some think through texture and material, others through colour or transparency, but I’ve always found the weaving structure the most exciting part. How dense is a weaving? How do these weaving structures affect a woven image? Is the woven image tight and strong or loose and falling apart?
Over the past few years, I’ve worked on increasingly loose weavings, drawn by the idea of an ‘unstable weaving’. We often think of woven fabric as solid, practical, and dependable, but weaving with large floating sections introduces a sense of precarity and risk. A friend once described one of my weavings as “balancing on the edge of an image,” and that phrase has stayed with me: the idea of a loose weaving structure threatening the integrity of an image, as if the image could unravel at any moment.
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- Apparition Small I
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- Apparition Small I – Reverse
‘Apparition’ Series
The imagery in this series derives from 16th and 17th century religious etchings from museum archives. I found these etchings moving and was struck by how they sought to capture such grand themes in such a diminutive format. Like weaving, etchings are limited in size, in their case by the width of the printing press. And the similarities continue: both have one foot in craft and the other in fine art, historically there’s a practical element to both (e.g weaving for domestic textiles, etching for map making and pamphlets) and fundamentally, both are languages of line; the cross hatching of etching mirrors the warp and weft of weaving. It felt natural for me to explore the conversation between the two.
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- Apparition
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- Apparition – Reverse
I was particularly interested in etchings that depict moments of enlightenment or some kind of divine communication. These fleeting moments of contact are depicted as a ray of light, or perhaps a movement of air, leading from the protagonist to somewhere beyond the etching plate. The drama of the image is sometimes focused in these small sections of lines. I was fascinated by how something so overwhelmingly important is depicted in such a minimal, abstracted form.
While I’m neither religious nor particularly spiritual, the process of bringing threads together to construct a fabric feels miraculous. It’s a fleeting feeling but it’s very joyful. The transformation of thread into cloth – of abstraction into image – brings sudden clarity, and his weavings try to echo that sensation through a kind of structural precarity: the shift from chaos to order, from looseness to tension.
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- The Stage is Set
Materials & Studio:
The majority of the work showcased in the exhibition – De Cuando Jugábamos* at Galeria Silvestre, Madrid – was woven on an unbleached linen warp at Vi-Tre studio in Bontebok, Netherlands. I chose a linen warp for its character; it’s both soft and strong, and as I tried to wind the warp it would jump and spin in different directions as if it was trying to escape the loom’s constraints. Sometimes working within the horizontal and vertical grid of a loom can feel very mathematical so I appreciated the wild nature of the loose linen disrupting some of this logic. I also made additional works at Valitila Studio, Helsinki on a cotton warp – another great studio to work in.
About…
While studying painting and printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art, Louis Nye’s paintings gradually began to resemble textiles and so he tried weaving for the first time on a TC1 – and he’s never looked back. Today, he works mainly on digital looms, making pictorial weavings that play with the limits of structure and visibility.
Links…
Instagram: @louisnye
Website: www.louisnye.com
*Curated by Vanessa Sanchez and Marta Barrenechea. Featuring Marta Barrenechea, Amparo de la Sota, Louis Nye and Saar Scheerlings
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