About Susie Gillespie & Fine Art Weaving

Susie Gillespie Fine Art Weaver

Sitting at the loom in a light and airy studio, tucked away in an ancient Devon orchard, one could imagine that it is here that artist Susie Gillespie finds her inspiration. However far beyond this quiet valley, her stunning woven artworks have been influenced by the prehistoric use of nettle in Egyptian and northern European textiles.

Susie uses antique linen yarn, and nettle, which she imports from the traditional spinners of the Himalayas, to give rich texture and a subtle depth to her weaving. Explaining her use of these unusual materials, Susie recalls her days of visiting museums where she began to appreciate the art that went into the making of prehistoric textiles.

“I was moved in a way that was perhaps more than a purely aesthetic response as if the act of weaving and the hours that went into producing even a small amount of cloth still gave life to these fragments.”
“I began to understand how using hand-spun yarns such as linen and nettle could transform a piece into fine art weaving. The filaments still seem to have life in them and give the cloth I weave the organic and tactile qualities I so admire in Coptic fragments and other early textiles.”

Susie uses the giant Himalayan nettle, Girardinia diversivolia, known as Allo whose long fibres lend themselves to productive spinning. Even the linens used in her work have an unusual story. “I often found machine spun linen lifeless and was lucky to hear of a batch of handspun linen yarn found in a derelict French weaving shop. It is difficult to age but is probably more than a hundred years old. It has lost none of its weaving qualities and has a character and colour that make it seem alive to my fingers and wonderful to use in artwork.”

Always on the search for hand-woven threads Susie knows that spinning is hard and often unpleasant work. Fortunately she has found a Sherpa who sends her nettle spun by Nepalese women, who begin the long process of preparing the giant stinging nettles by using their teeth to decorticate it.

Watching Susie prepare the warp for her next piece one begins to appreciate the physical energy that goes into weaving and then becomes part of the story behind each piece. Having owned a number of looms over the years, Susie has now settled on the pine loom that dominates her Devon studio.

“It’s a relatively large loom that enabled me to have a good tension in the fabric which is ideal for weaving with such traditional yarns.” “I collect ideas in my head but I really need to start weaving to begin to see the work shaping into a woven image”.

The inspiration from my current work comes from the form and texture of Ancient stones, a set of stone steps creeping up a Nepalese mountainside and memories of working on an archaeological dig in Brittany and visiting the Neolithic standing stones in Carnac”.

“It is so much more than the rich texture and colour of the stones that I try to portray in my work – it is the historic atmosphere of these places and the lives that have touched these stones over many centuries.” With such traditional and natural images inspiring her work, it is not surprising that Susie relies on a subtle and natural palette of colours.

The decoration in her work relies on the surface qualities inherent in the weave and the character of the yarn. The resulting artwork has a very contemporary feel and one can picture it adorning the whitewashed walls of traditional Devon barns as well as the rooms of stylish apartments.

Notes:
Nettle:
Allo, Girardinia diversifolia, the giant Nepalese stinging nettle, occurs naturally in damp woodland above altitudes of 1500metres and grows to a height of 3 metres, much taller than our native nettles. The fibre is the longest known in plants and has a high tensile strength and water resistance.

Coptic Textiles:
Indigenous Egyptian weavers during the Late Roman/Early Byzantine era produced amazingly intricate textile art. The small tapestry and pieces were used to decorate tunics or 'dalmatics' and were woven in a combination of linen and wool. Some preserved in graves under extremely dry, sandy conditions, are now the earliest textiles available to collectors and museums, dating from the 4th and 5th centuries.