Sinking hands into blood wood

Pink runs through the raw

Walnuts carry colour river long

Infinity red wing upsidedown arch

 

Rachel Long told me to put my Rachel Long shawl in the washing machine, I was bit affronted, “like hell” I thought, but after talking to Long about her work over dinner perhaps I understand a little more. Obsessed with the mesh of tech and hand, bulk and tightness, chemical and raw, metallic and flat and soft versus scraping, Long dives deep into the contrasts afforded by her loom and by the production of her diverse and bespoke yarns, many of which are hand dyed. In this new body of work entitled Envelope these incongruities, conflicts and contrasts coupled with the tapestry edges themselves, where one yarn ends and another starts, can be read as subject. 

 

I know the room where Long moves her shuttle back and forward over and over on the stunning sculptural architecture of her loom, it opens to the sea and the blocky bluff of the Miramar Peninsula, in fact if I rose up above this building like a screeching Kākā with red under my wings, I would see the shape of the arm of water that extends from Matiu Somes to the airport is indeed a blocky rotund form too. Like orca that know the action of tracing the entire edge of Te Whanganui-a-Tara in search of stingray, Long speaks of knowing when to turn the shuttle back on itself and thereby mark the edge of her textile system. If I were a weaver I would spin water into yarn and bluff into cloth too. It makes sense on a fundamental and visceral level: Whenua and Ranginui woven into cloth. 

 

Ann Shelton 2022