Lei (She)

Manufactured by Pennese Tapestry Workshop, Pescara, Italy.

Tapestry is a form of textile art traditionally woven by hand on a loom. From the Middle Ages on, European tapestries could be very large, with images containing dozens of figures or more. Complicated to make,relatively fragile and (above all) costly, these historical pieces were intended to hang vertically on a wall (or sometimes horizontally over a piece of furniture such as a table or bed). They were often also made in sets so that a whole room could be hung with them, adding visual splendour as well as warmth to the homes of the wealthy and powerful.

In late mediaeval Europe, tapestry was the grandest and most expensive medium for figurative images in two dimensions, and despite the rapid rise in importance of painting, it retained this position in the eyes of many Renaissance patrons until at least the end of the 16th century, if not beyond. The European tradition continued to develop and reflect wider changes in artistic styles until the French Revolution (1789-1799) and Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), before being revived on a smaller scale in the 19th century.

Tapestry should be distinguished from the different technique of embroidery, although large pieces of embroidery with images are sometimes loosely called ‘tapestry’, as with the famous Bayeux Tapestry (an embroidered 11th-century cloth, nearly 70 metres long and 50 centimetres tall, depicting the events leading up to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, culminating in the Battle of Hastings), which is in fact embroidered.

Technically, tapestry is weft-faced weaving, in which all the warp threads are hidden in the completed work (unlike most woven textiles, where both the warp and the weft threads may be visible). In tapestry weaving, weft yarns are typically discontinuous (unlike brocade); the artisan interlaces each coloured weft back and forth in its own small pattern area. Most weavers use a natural warp thread (such as wool, linen, or cotton) but they may also include silk, gold, silver, etc. European tapestries are normally made to be seen only from one side and often have a plain lining added on the back. However, other traditions, such as Chinese kesi and that of pre-Columbian Peru, make tapestry to be seen from both sides.

Liselotte Watkins’s colourful tapestry Lei (She) is the stunning result of the contemporary artist’s collaboration with the legendary Pennese Tapestry Workshop in Italy. Unlike other tapestry workshops in Italy and Europe (such as those in France and Portugal), which use high-warp looms, the Pennese Tapestry Workshop follows its own technical characteristics, using low-warp looms with four handcrafted heddles, designed in-house. The weaving of a low-shaft tapestry requires close collaboration with the artist. This goes for the initial phase of creating the cartoon (drawing/painting, made on paper or cloth, the same size as the planned tapestry), upon which the finished work is based, as well as choosing the dyes for the wool.

Founded in 1965, the Pennese Tapestry Workshop represents the excellence of artistic craftsmanship in Penne, an ancient mediaeval village in the province of Pescara (in the Abruzzo region of Italy). The Pennese Tapestry Workshop was founded by two masters from the local ‘Mario Dei Fiori’ Art Institute, Fernando Di Nicola and Nicola Tonelli, together with a skilled group of weavers (their former students).

In the late 1990s, tapestry production slowed down (eventually ceasing altogether) following the death of one of the two founding masters. Thanks to a couple of employees (Erminia Di Teodoro and Lolita Vellante, both from Penne and with thirty years of experience in tapestry weaving), however, the workshop was brought back to life. Since 2018, under the ownership of Brioni (one of Italy’s leading tailors), the workshop has developed new technical means of production (by adopting contemporary mechanised manufacturing processes), making it one of the few companies in Italy still active in this sector.

Over the years, the tapestries of Penne have been featured in numerous national and international exhibitions in Milan, Rome, New York and Las Vegas, and Penne has also created several renowned monumental tapestries, like the (over eight metres long) textile for the ‘Vittorio Emanuele II’ National Central Library in Rome.