Midwinter Naver

Midwinter Naver
Midwinter Naver Fan Form

Title: Midwinter Naver
Size: 175cms w x 80 cms h
Date: 2007

MIDWINTER NAVER Standing on the shores of Loch Naver on a dull, misty winters afternoon, suddenly a shaft of sunshine lit up a narrow strip of the loch, lifting the gloom and bringing alive the colours of the far shore and the flanks of Ben Klibreck as they emerged from the mist. I felt I could almost hear the living sounds of the long ago depopulated villages coming across the water and across time to me. I wove this tapestry in strips to try to capture this feeling of a rupture in time. I broke up the image into sections which would correspond to the warp for the Sutherland tartan and vestiges of the tartan's colours can be seen in the piece as you can feel the vestiges the lives once lived there. The piece can be hung either as a rectangle or as a fan shape - in this form emphasising allusions to the pleats of a kilt and kilt as expression of belonging to a place. The palette of this piece was directly inspired by the colours I saw that day and I have been experimenting ever since with dyeing combinations of violet and orange to arrive at exactly the colour of dead bracken seen in low winter light.