woven art installations

Rachel Tuffy is a designer, artist and educator specialising in weaving. After studying textile design in London, Rachel worked as designer for companies manufacturing woven textiles for interiors. In 2001 she set up Rachel O’Connell Textiles, designing woollen home textiles produced by handweavers in Ireland. Her projects over the past 20+ years have been wide ranging in context, from collaborating with handweavers in Nepal on sustainable Nettle Fibre products, to the development of new textiles for patient rooms with the Mater Hospital, Dublin. Rachel is passionate about sustainable practices, in particular the valorisation of Irish “waste” wool. More recently she has been working on textile art pieces including Ode to Weaving, a series of large wool tapestries, made in collaboration with Botany Weaving Mill in Dublin 8.

Ode to Weaving Tapestries

Liberties House, Cork St. Dublin 8

Materials: 100% Wool. Jacquard Woven in Botany Weaving Mill, Emerald Square, Dublin 8 Ode to Weaving is a series of tapestries honouring the history of weaving in the Liberties in Dublin 8. Hanging in Liberties House on Cork Street, the pieces were created in collaboration with Botany Weaving Mill, based less than 500m from Liberties House. Botany is the last surviving mill representing a local weave industry that dates back over 1000 years.

Inspiration was taken from the Leslie Eastwood archive in NIVAL, housed in the National College of Design, Dublin 8. The archive includes a wide range of weave designs plotted out by hand on graph paper. These are beautiful artifacts in themselves, including complex jacquard designs with thousands of tiny squares of colour, hand painted by Leslie. The painted colours aren’t representative of the final cloth but are a technical indicator of where certain warp and weft threads come to the surface. The palette is playful and contemporary, fitting well with the modern interior colours of
Liberties House.

Botany Weaving Mill design and manufacture fabric and carpet for the aviation and rail industries using state-of-the-art digital jacquard looms. The artwork for Ode to Weaving was created through hand and digital drawing, imported into specialist weave software where weave structures were applied, pixels replacing the hand-coloured squares. Botany’s rapid production looms allowed for the testing of a variety of approaches to the artwork, weave structures and colour.

The final tapestries were created with specially dyed 100% wool yarn, colour blocked in the warp and weft. The weave structures create the woven imagery by hiding, revealing and mixing the warp and weft threads, resulting in a large-scale graphic interpretation of traditional weaves on point paper.

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