The Weaver’s Apprentice

Dovecot Studios

Edinburgh

March 10 to July 1

www.dovecotstudios.com

ONE hundred years ago, Dovecot founder weavers John ‘Jack’ Glassbrook and Gordon Berry, both apprenticed at the William Morris studio, went to the trenches of World War 1, swapping the tapestry loom for the machinery of war. Neither came back. The tapestries on which they were working hung, untouched, covered, in the studio they had left behind.

But if they spent their last days in the killing fields of WWI, their minds were in part on the tapestries that gathering dust at Dovecot. “I’m very anxious to get back to see how the tapestry is getting on,” wrote Glassbrook a mere month before his war ended.

Three apprentices continued their work – Ronald Cruikshank, Richard Gordon and David Lindsay Anderson – and so it has been ever since, with weavers taken on and trained up, working their way through the tapestry room hierarchy until they too become master weavers. Such apprentices are there yet, down in the public gallery of Dovecot, learning their trade under the gaze of visitors passing through.

In celebration of these generations of apprentices, Dovecot is showing works, including a number of rare items on loan, from the weavers’ hands. The earliest work is a post-war Gordon, usually hanging in Mount Stuart, but on loan from the National Museums of Scotland. It was part of Dovecot’s first commission from their founder, the Marquess of Bute.

Dovecot apprentices are encouraged to innovate, to create their own style. Ben Hymers is the current apprentice, the seventh generation since Gordon, and his apprentice piece, Hipsters Love Triangles (2015) will be exhibited along with his self-designed work, Penelope. On selected dates until the end of the exhibition, Hymers will demonstrate how he weaves and answer any queries about weaving or his apprenticeship.