‘What makes a good weaver is experience’: Alan Oliver showcases his craft – in pictures

Alan Oliver says: ‘Once upon a time, weaving would have been everywhere and we’ve spent centuries divorcing ourselves from the normal. If you’re a creative in Britain today, you have to market your business, but at the same time I find myself drawn back to the functionality and the ordinariness of it. Because it’s functional doesn’t mean it’s no less art than something else. It’s just that you’re doing it with a set of parameters to fulfil that function. In order to be an artist, you have to abandon that unless you can contextualise it in an artistic way. That’s the constant conflict.’

‘When I started my master’s, I didn’t know what I wanted to do but I knew that I was a weaver and I wanted to be able to call myself an artist. At the time I considered myself to be a weaver and I considered what I did to be art but I didn’t feel like I was allowed to actually call it art. There’s an age-old debate about craft v art and I don’t think its going to be resolved any time soon. The two are inextricably linked and, for whatever reason, I felt I needed that bit of paper. The frustrating thing about being an artist is it means negotiating the art world and I don’t really care for it.’

‘I left school at 15 and got one job, then another job and then another job. Eventually I ended up in a finance company and had a career without really knowing how that happened. I got to about 36 or 37 and wondered who’d want to do this any more and that’s when I set up an upholstery practice, which was born out of a love of textiles and which ultimately led to this.’

‘Recently I’ve found myself very emotional when talking about London, weaving and textiles. The city’s very central to my work because I think of my practise as being three strands: there’s the teaching, commissioned work and the artistic side. If it’s a commission for a rug then there’s the functionality, which has to be adhered to, whereas if it’s an art piece for the wall, that gives you more license to play around with different materials. The artistic strand is what developed from me doing a master’s degree and is based on artistic research around place and identity.’

‘The art pieces tend to be a result of ongoing projects around place and themes of migration and displacement. When you look at London, you think: “What’s the identity of London?” This is where I live and, so as makers we take what’s around us and we make things with it. That interests me in regards to the migratory effects of material and of course London as a place of identity is its river, its trade, its commerce, its empire, slavery, all of that. I find it so fascinating here. My final masters piece was all about the Heygate estate.’

‘When the Heygate estate was being demolished, there was a huge Central American population that was displaced. My final MA piece was all about London, its people and displacement and so the dye that I used was from avocado skins collected from cafes during the pandemic. It references displaced people and the displacement of rivers in Central America, where avocados are farmed. It’s a comment on London and questioning the destiny of a place. Some of the visuals were quite reminiscent of the Heygate. Some of the lines are similar to Aztec designs so it seemed to lend itself perfectly.’

‘Another piece called Current is inspired by the river. All the greens are from things that I have collected along the river, mainly from buddleja growing in the wild and the greys are from tannic acid and iron collected along the river. From the foreshore you can go mudlarking (with a licence) on the South Bank from Waterloo down to Southwark Bridge, collecting old nails and things like that. All the greys in Current are literally from the river and then the pink is from lac and it comes from India so there’s this idea of migration.’

‘This pink one is called When Was the World Pink and everything on there is a shade of pink even though it doesn’t look like it because of the colour theory. Some of it has come from here along the river. The second pink on the right is dyed from willow, which was collected along the Thames. All the others are from things like madder and cochineal, which would have been traded throughout centuries, and avocado skins.’

‘These are all the undyed yarns that I use for my rugs. They will all be dyed at some point. It’s quite hard to get decent rug yarns in Britain. You can get Axminster yarns that are 80:20 - 80% wool and 20% nylon - and they are commercially available. I quite like working in 100% wool. I don’t mind Axminster yarns but sometimes that addition of the nylon makes it quite tricky for they dye to take at times.’

‘Cloth, whether it’s a rug or a tea towel or anything, is made up of two things: a weft and a warp. The warp is what sits on the loom and the weft is what goes from left to right. Sitting on the loom, which makes up the integral part of the cloth, is the warp. We dress the loom with our warp and the the weft is what we put on to our shuttle which travels across the warp to create the cloth.’

‘You buy yarn on cones but I can’t throw them into a dye bath so I have to turn them into hanks or skeins and then I can dye them. Some producers put them into hanks for me already when they’re shipped, which is great. Otherwise it’s a whole other step to the process. You don’t want to make the skein too tight or it can create issues with the dye. Too tight and it can’t move freely in the pot and the dye can’t penetrate that area.’

‘We have different shuttles and these are ski shuttles. For rug weaving I always use a ski shuttle because you’re using quite thick yarns and it allows you to get a decent amount on to a shuttle. Other shuttles are a boat shuttle, which you might use for weaving cloth. For a rug, I’d have to reload it every two minutes but for weaving cloth with a fine linen, the large ski shuttle wouldn’t be ideal.’

‘Weaving is not complex, it’s literally just a thread crossing another thread. But what makes a good weaver is experience. I’m passing the weft across from one side. When you open your shafts - raising and lowering the shafts - we create what we call a shed. The shed is what the shuttle passes through. That is what essentially makes the cloth. Within that shed I pass my weft and I pick up a weft from the other side and bring it back so in this one shed I have two different colours, two different wefts. You have a join, where what you don’t hide will be visible.’

‘People often ask how much time there is involved in making a piece. It depends on the process, in how much dyeing is to be done, whether there’s a fade where there’s much more colours than if there’s just block colours. It takes anything from 40-60 hours in total but that’s not a week or a week and a half of weaving. I wish it was but a week equates to about 10 hours of weaving and the rest of the time’s taken up with periphery tasks or making skeins, dyeing etc. About 60% of my time is spent doing other things like marketing, and I teach as well.’

‘Dyeing itself is an art. There are some people for who that’s all they do. If you think of weaving, spinning and dyeing together then it’s a very broad church and people often don’t veer outside of their lane and just explore their own thing for ever. Indigo dyers never seem to be able to go beyond indigo dye once they find it. It captivates them and they seem to spend their life with blue hands.’

‘If I can, I like to use 100% wool that’s worsted spun, which is hard-wearing and you want that for a rug because it’s going underfoot. It is impossible to find in Britain - no one spins it. So, this is New Zealand wool, spun in India to reasonable quality. Our own wool rots in fields. We’re a nation full of sheep but the farmers can’t afford to sell their fleeces and yet I can get New Zealand wool spun in Lithuania at a mill that really knows what they’re doing. That’s the difference between the good and the exceptional.’

‘I have to have some idea about what it is I’m weaving. I’m not a cloth weaver. I weave rugs, which are less dynamic than textiles. I have to place the yarn rather than just throw and beat, throw and beat. If I was a cloth weaver I might simply sit down and weave a metre of cloth because I wanted to just sit at the loom.’

‘Tassels are effectively the warp ends that you can see on the loom. When it comes off the loom there’s a degree of finishing that has to be done. This is several rows of knotting and then your tassel. People don’t like tassels on the whole because they get ratty over time, vacuums catch them or cats play with them. These days I generally tend to do a woven edge, which is actually quite time consuming, but I think it looks nice and creates just two large tassels.’

‘My former studio was a place on the sidings going into Waterloo railway station. It was a Nissen hut, which was originally put in when they were building Eurostar there. When they moved out in the early 2000s the woman who took on the lease turned them into artists’ studios. The reason I moved here was I was sharing the one in Waterloo and I’d teach at weekends when my studio partner wasn’t there. I wanted to expand the teaching and needed to have my own space. I’ve only been here since December but it’s fantastic and I love it.’

‘I find that the more I weave, the more I limit myself in terms of technique. I used to weave far more twills and more complex weaves but now I almost always go back to plain weave. A twill is just a different weave structure. All your warp ends run one way and your weft ends running that way. For every sq cm of cloth you have exactly the same number of warp ends as you do weft ends. In a twill you’re jumping over two warp ends at a time so you’ll have more weft ends than you will warp ends. I think the reason I like plain weave is that it’s the basis of all weaving.’

‘In terms of rug weaving I think I’m probably one of fewer than 10 practising now. If you remove the people who have retired or not actively weaving now, then it’s under 10 people who are actively producing rugs professionally in the UK.’

‘I don’t want to change careers again. What I love about it is that there’s scope within it for me to do whatever I want. I really enjoy the teaching although I didn’t think I would - and that, in a way, gives me the time to experiment and try new things. I’m aware of the issues with arthritis - in my hips now as well as in my hands - but I’ll never not make. Sitting at the loom can be quite painful but perhaps I’ll get a new hip soon. It’s great getting older. You finally figure out what it is you want and then your body starts to give up.’