Bath Spa University

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The MTC Celebration Tapestry

In 1997, Colin Crumplin was commissioned to design a new tapestry to hang in the Michael Tippett Centre auditorium.

Colin Crumplin

Colin Crumplin has had eleven solo exhibitions and taken part in forty group exhibitions in the UK and abroad since 1970. He is Reader in Fine Art at Bath Spa University. He writes:

The tapestry, which has been made this year, is a same-size transcription of a painting I finished in 1996.

All the paintings I have made in the 1990's are in two parts: a first section that appears 'abstract', and a second section, which appears to represent a photographic image. The first section is made by spreading acrylic paint by hand on the unstretched canvas laid on the floor. This is then folded, making a monoprint and giving rise to a chance-derived image. I make many of these, photograph them and, using these photographs as a kind of notebook, consider over a period what other image to set with them. In some of my paintings the correspondence between the panels is very obvious and the image is one that many people have seen in the first section. Some are less obvious.

In the case of Flood (Florence) the black section at the top is read as 'suggesting' flooding water. I painted the second section from a photograph of the flood which overtook part of Florence in 1966.

My interest is in painting and 'picturing' and our prodigious memory for images. We describe things by saying they 'look like' others and the naming of configurations in stars and clouds for example, pervades periods and cultures.

Christine Sawyer

The tapestry has been made by Christine Sawyer. Christine was born in Yorkshire, and trained at Bath Academy of Art in Corsham, which is now part of Bath Spa University. She taught Art and Design in secondary schools for many years, and was then appointed Lecturer in Textiles at Rolle College, Exmouth, a post she left in 1976 in order to start a family. In the mid 1980's Christine became seriously interested in the medium of woven tapestry, and in 1997 was accepted onto the Crafts Council Selected Index. In 1991 she became an active member of the South West Textile Group.