Breaking Through Tradition – Contemporary Tapestry in France

In recent years in France, traditional techniques that stretch back five centuries have been utilized to create bold new adventures in tapestry in an unparalleled way. It is a great credit to the weavers, trained skillfully in methods that are centuries old, that they are willing and able to rise to challenges and accept new concepts in creating a tapestry. In part, this transformation has been fueled by the need to survive, but for the most part, it is an acceptance of being recharged by an injection of visual ideas that have not only capitalized upon their time-honored skills but have turned those skills into a new vehicle of artistic expression. Read the following accompaniment to the online exhibition Breaking Through Tradition – Contemporary Tapestry in France. 

Curator’s Biography

Cresside Collette has been a tapestry weaver for more than forty years. A foundation weaver with the Victorian Tapestry Workshop (now the Australian Tapestry Workshop) in Melbourne (where she worked for fifteen years) she has maintained her own weaving practice and exhibited consistently since 1971. She taught tapestry weaving and drawing at RMIT University for 11 years and in 2011, designed her annual tour, Mastering the Fine Art of Tapestry, to view the best of the art form in France and the U.K. Cresside is currently working towards an exhibition of tapestries drawn from the landscape in the country of her birth, Sri Lanka.