Movement in Tapestry

The 800 tapestries Silvia Heyden wove over the course of 50 years brought her to the essence of tapestry. They fulfilled a long-held wish first articulated shortly after graduation from Art School in 1952: to rediscover the truly woven, and revitalize weaving as a distinct art form. The numerous drawings and sketchpads that have recently come to light, excerpts of which are included here, along with extensive documentation she had prepared of more than half of her tapestries, provide an overview of her insights into weaving. For Heyden, the beauty and fascination of weaving began with the integral nature of figure and ground, both of which the weaver has to create, unlike a drawing which starts with the background of a sheet of paper, or a painting which starts with a woven canvas. The unique simultaneity of foreground figures and their background forms in weaving leads to numerous further interactions whose balance is particular to weaving, including between technique and aesthetics, between weaving and drawing, between the craft and the art of weaving, culminating in the dialogue between means and meaning, as she liked to say. These dichotomies, between how a tapestry is made and how it is looks, reveal an entire world of profound aesthetic and conceptual ideas.… (more)