Deepest Darkest Blue

Dartmoor based artist Garry Fabian Miller has a practice of creating photographs without a camera, exposing photographic paper to light.   The photographic paper he uses has stopped being made and his own stock is dwindling. In spring of 2017, looking for new creative challenges and ways to develop his work,  he undertook a collaboration with the weavers at Dovecot Tapestry Studios to translate one of his sublime abstract images into tapestry. Visual journeys to extremes – edges of perception, experience and even existence are characteristics of Garry Fabian Miller’s work, including the image chosen for the collaboration, made by light passing through vetrines of water onto the photographic paper.  ‘Voyage into the Deepest Darkest Blue’ sets up a vibrating abstract horizon by setting rectangles of blue and orange side by side – an ‘ocean’ of blue meeting an orange ‘sky’ at an eternal, shimmering horizon.  The slight gradations in the colours and the unexpected peeks, blurs and zips of unexpected supplementary colours set the weavers a challenge in translating the subtle fields of colour into wool on a loom. Tapestry, being set up on the grid of the loom’s warp and woof, is well suited to horizontal and vertical lines, but the subtle blending, blurring and overall softenss of most of the image are not natural for the binatrry medium of tapestry. The painstaking handmade process encompasses thousands of decisions about colour, many made in the planning and sampling stages, others made as the weavers feel their way toward the essence of an image. The short film follows the creation process, is without narrative, and accompanied the stunning tapestry in the exhibition where it was displayed.  It includes time-lapse of the work and plays with the dualities of the two weavers workign side by side and the two colours of the image.

The slight gradations in the colours and the unexpected peeks, blurs and zips of unexpected supplementary colours set the weavers a challenge in translating the subtle fields of colour into wool on a loom. Tapestry, being set up on the grid of the loom’s warp and woof, is well suited to horizontal and vertical lines, but the subtle blending, blurring and overall softenss of most of the image are not natural for the binatrry medium of tapestry. The painstaking handmade process encompasses thousands of decisions about colour, many made in the planning and sampling stages, others made as the weavers feel their way toward the essence of an image. The short film follows the creation process, is without narrative, and accompanied the stunning tapestry in the exhibition where it was displayed.  It includes time-lapse of the work and plays with the dualities of the two weavers workign side by side and the two colours of the image.