About Tapestry 6
About Tapestry Continued/6
During the 1960s and 70s there was an important and influential international Fibre Art movement whose focal points were the Lausanne Biennale and the Lodz Triennale. Contemporary tapestry played its part in this movement and for a decade or so was viewed as quite cutting-edge until the art world moved on and concept and theory eclipsed skill and beauty.
Tapestry is still an expensive commodity. It is also anachronistic and quite subversive in that it is a slow and painstaking process which requires many years of training, totally at odds with the instant gratification age that we live in. Nevertheless across the world there are several thousand professional tapestry weavers making and selling their work and their tapestries can be found in churches, private homes, offices and other public buildings.
Even up to the present, commissioning and owning a large tapestry is still a visible expression of wealth and prestige for corporate clients. It also has the unique added benefit in today’s somewhat noisy, hard-surfaced modern interiors of reducing echoes and quenching sharp sounds as well as adding visual warmth to austere spaces. Nowadays too, many designer/weavers also work at a more intimate scale that is suitable for private homes and smaller spaces.
Today subject matter and style in contemporary tapestry are as diverse and personal as in any other art form.