Marmalade Issue 5, 2017

‘The job you didn’t know
you always wanted’: the
2016 Australian tapestry
workshop trainee program
Words by Emeritus Professor Kay Lawrence
Kay is the Head of the South Australian School of Art,
University of South Australia.
The 1970s in Australia was a buoyant decade for the visual
arts, craft and design. South Australia and Victoria (at the
time led by visionary premiers Don Dunstan and Rupert
Hamer respectively) saw cultural development, especially the
creation of craft and design based organisations, as bringing
a distinctive character to each state as well as offering
training and employment in the arts. They saw their role
as being key to the development of an economically viable
cultural sector. In South Australia this vision was realised with
the establishment of the South Australian Craft Authority
(later JamFactory) in 1973. The organisation was set up to
provide professional training for crafts people, establish sales
outlets for high-quality craft and design, and to promote
the development of design-led mass-production in South
Australia. Aware that Australian artists were increasingly
commissioning European workshops to translate their
paintings into woven tapestry, the Victorian government
grasped the opportunity to create an Australian-based
workshop to interpret the work of Australian artists into
tapestry for public commission. To this end, in 1976 they
established the Victorian Tapestry Workshop now the
Australian Tapestry Workshop (ATW).
The ancient practice of tapestry weaving was little known
in Australia in the 1970s, although post-war migration in the
1950s and 1960s had attracted a number of skilled weavers
from Europe to set up professional practice in New South
Wales. But the impetus for the blossoming of woven tapestry
in Australia came from Archie Brennan, Director of the
Edinburgh Tapestry Company (also known as the Dovecot),
and Belinda Ramson who worked with Brennan at the
Dovecot in the late 1960s. Brennan and Ramson conducted
a series of tapestry workshops in Victoria, New South Wales
and South Australia in the mid-1970s and in 1974 Brennan was
appointed as advisor to the committee convened to establish
the ATW. He suggested that an evolutionary philosophy
be taken to the development of the workshop in order to
develop a distinctly Australian outlook to the translation of
artworks into tapestry. He recommended working with the
most interesting and challenging contemporary artists and
taking a collaborative approach to both interpretation and
weaving. By recruiting a small group of trainees with art
school qualifications, and offering them training in tapestry
technique and time to develop their own tapestry language
before undertaking commissions, the workshop would be
able to develop its own ethos and ways of working. Belinda
Ramson was employed for four intensive weekend workshops
to pass on her own meticulous skills to a group of 13 art
school graduates selected from 150 applicants from across
Australia. Five of these participants became the foundation
weavers of the ATW: Cresside Collette, Marie Cook, Merrill
Dumbrell, Sara Lindsay and Liz Nettleton, joined six months
later by Cheryl Thornton and apprentice Sue Batten (nee
Hick) recruited straight from school.
Forty years later 76 weavers have been trained and have
worked at the ATW, many staying for 20 years or more while
others developed their own professional practices in the
medium. Their accumulated expertise can be recognised in
the distinctive approach to tapestry weaving developed at
the workshop. ATW tapestries are noted for their superlative
technique, mastery of colour and tone, and an approach
to interpretation that employs the particular characteristics
of weaving to bring out the unique qualities of the
original artwork.
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