We are pleased to present the opportunity for you to bring home a little piece of Dovecot.
After a tapestry is completed, the workspace is saturated with the numerous blends of yarn that brought it to life. At Dovecot, the weavers transform these leftover yarns into small woven squares. These samples capture the colours and textures of the larger tapestry, while giving new purpose to yarn that might otherwise be discarded. For the weavers, each square is also a way of bidding farewell to a project that has been so carefully worked on for many months, or even years.
Each of these samples is the end point of a large, complex tapestry, embodying the precision and craftsmanship at the heart of every Dovecot commission. Below, you can explore the one-of-a-kind samples, along with information about the original pieces they were created from.
The samples are available to purchase for £250 each. If you're interested in purchasing a tapestry sample, please follow the links below, email info@dovecotstudios.com or call us on 0131 550 3660
Every sample sold supports Dovecot and allows us to create artwork for Scotland and sustain the future of tapestry weaving.
Tapestry Colour Studies: Dovecot Studios after JMW Turner, Sea View 2021
Sea View is a tapestry interpretation of a watercolour by the romantic British painter, Joseph Mallard William Turner. Although small in scale (the original artwork is only 13.5x19cm), the painting captures a bounding energy and threatening, yet hopeful view of the ocean.
The tapestry marks the final piece created as part of Elaine Wilson’s three year weaving apprenticeship.
The original tapestry is also available to purchase.
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Sekai Machache and Dovecot Studios, Lively Blue 2023
Lively Blue was created specially for Dovecot’s exhibition ‘Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception’ in 2023.
Woven by Ben Hymers, the tapestry is based on Sekai Machache's abstract ink drawings that make up a wider exploration of the colour blue, particularly indigo. Indigo has a complex colonial history due to its prominence as a cultivatable plant in the West Indies and American South.
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Tapestry Colour Studies: Dovecot Studios after Raphael, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes (detail), 2022
Woven using one of Raphael’s original cartoons as a starting point, the tapestry reflects current practices in tapestry interpretation, creating a more natural and painterly feel for the design, rather than the more formal weaving style found in renaissance tapestry.
Dovecot weavers propose this tapestry to be a Post-Raphaelite interpretation, acknowledging and celebrating the Renaissance master’s huge influence on art, and weaving the design to reflect the naturalism and spirit of Raphael’s vision in the original cartoons.
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Dovecot Studios after Leon Kossoff, Study from ‘Minerva Protects Pax from Mars’ by Rubens, 2021
A monumental piece, this is the first time an artwork by the expressionist painter Leon Kossoff (1926–2019) has been translated into tapestry.
This project was a collaboration with the Leon Kossoff Artistic Estate, Piano Nobile gallery, and Parabola, the visionary developer behind the creation of Edinburgh Park, a new public realm in the west of the city where the tapestry now hangs. This commission represents the importance of tapestry as a public artform in Scotland and is a statement of intent for Edinburgh.
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Elizabeth Price and Dovecot Studios, Sad Carrel, 2021
A hand-tufted textile work elaborates a vinyl record motif, found in the music room of Glasgow’s Mitchell Library, into a new composition. It alludes to the emergence of independent cultural forms in the urban spaces both abandoned and made available by de-industrialisation.
Price’s own recollections of Glasgow from her formative experience as a touring musician in the band Talulah Gosh inform the work.
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Dovecot Studios after Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Glacier Ice Face 2024
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham is celebrated as a leading figure in post-war British abstract art. Her artwork often drew inspiration from forms she observed in nature, with the formidable glacier being one of the most prominent throughout her career.
In May 1949, Barns-Graham visited the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland, sparking what would become a 45-year love affair with the glacier as a subject. To celebrate this remarkable series, and a new publication devoted to it, Dovecot collaborated with the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust to reinterpret her 1951 painting Glacier Ice Face.
The original tapestry is available to purchase.
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Alberta Whittle, Ring Around the Rosy, 2023
Commissioned by The Modern Institute for Whittle's 2023 exhibition Even in the most beautiful place in the world, our breath can falter, the work encompasses both a sense of childhood joy and a haunted quality – the nursery rhyme is widely understood to reference the Great Plague of London. The piece sits on a new gate, powder coated in municipal green, which references the Caribbean built environment as well as the architecture of incar.
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Jock McFadyen, Mallaig, 2021
A major artwork that interpreted the Scottish artist’s gritty, urban vision through the dramatic sensuality of fine art textile. The intense inky blues in this work are particularly suited to being transformed by the depth of colour and the complex undertones that Dovecot’s skilled approach to gun-tufting can achieve.
The original rug is available to purchase
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Garry Fabian Miller and Dovecot Studios, Hearth Rug, Gathered Gold Light 2020
Since 2014, Dovecot has developed an extraordinary body of work in collaboration with fine art photographer Garry Fabian Miller. These artworks explore light, colour, texture and the depth of field between images in photography and three-dimensional textile. Artist and weavers collaborated to investigate the qualities and effects of representing light with gun-tufted wool.
Gathered Gold Light presented a new challenge to contrast the burning centre of light with the surrounding darkness and the circle of illumination between them.
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Angie Lewin and Dovecot Studios, Teabowl and Bracken 2023
Lewin's artistic practice is varied and includes linocuts, wood engravings, screen prints, collage and watercolours.
Teabowl and Bracken has been translated from a small wood engraving of the same name, measuring 5.5x7.5cm – the finished tapestry measures 75x111cm.
Weavers Louise Trotter and Ben Hymers worked hard to depict the texture of the original engraving in tapestry, especially when scaling up to such a degree.
The original tapestry is available to purchase.
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Elizabeth Blackadder, Still Life with Chequered Box
Dame Elizabeth Blackadder painted in oil and watercolours and worked with printmakers on a variety of printing techniques. The objects featured in her paintings are often those she collected during her many travels in Europe and in the East. The space between objects and their resonance with each other held a great fascination for her.
Dovecot's interpretation of Elizabeth Blackadder’s Still Life with Chequered Box, woven by Emma Jo Webster and Elaine Wilson, continues Dovecot’s collaboration with Blackadder and her work. Dovecot first worked with Blackadder in 1966, to weave Still Life (Tulips).
The original tapestry is available to purchase.
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King Charles III and Dovecot Studios, Abandoned Cottage on the Isle of Stroma, Caithness 2017
The tapestry was woven by Ben Hymers during the end of his three year tapestry apprenticeship and took eight months to create. In translating watercolour, Hymers has to create an element of translucence in wool colour, where the colour blends from one to another.
The tapestry depicts a watercolour by King Charles III, painted in Scotland. HM supported the project by generously giving permission for his watercolour to be translated by the apprentice.
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