SEVEN SISTERS HANDWEAVERS

Seven Sisters Handweavers is a community of handweavers, formed of graduates from the Diploma in Handweaving, run by the Handweavers Studio and Gallery, London. As a group, we are committed to contemporary handweaving in all its diversity. We include weavers who weave interior fabrics while others make wearable items. Some weave artworks. We have weavers who make both practical items and woven art. Some of us teach weaving. We all design and produce our own weaving from a range of sources of inspiration and ideas, and we use many different materials including recycled and dead-stock yarns. Each weaver in the group has a strong sense of personal identity as a handweaver, and we all show, sell and share our weaving in many different contexts. For all of us, handweaving is our primary occupation.

The Diploma in Handweaving is a unique two-year course that attracts students internationally. It is aimed at weavers who want to extend the range of their weaving and develop their own practice. It is structured much as a textile degree with a series of projects, meaning we have each had experience of designing and planning a wide range of different fabrics and woven items for various different purposes. Hosted by Handweavers, on Seven Sisters Road, London, it is taught through workshops from a range weaving tutors. Seven Sisters Handweavers come from a many different backgrounds, including a doctor, an academic, a civil servant, a graduate in textiles working as a designer and a professional industrial weaver. We all took our first steps in weaving in widely different contexts. We represent three cohorts of graduates from the Handweavers Studio Diploma: 2017, 2019 and 2021.

Collectively we have organised two exhibitions. The first was in 2022, ‘Edge to Edge. Weavers on Borders and Margins’. In this themed show, we sometimes treated our theme as a technical question. We also engaged with the metaphors and symbols of boundaries and margins. It opened at Handweavers and then toured to Køng Museums Væve- og Spindeskole, Denmark. Our second exhibition in 2024, ‘Crossing the warp - thread by thread’, at Whitchurch Silk Mill, Hampshire celebrated handweaving as a complement to the power looms at Whitchurch. Here we emphasised our distinctive individualities as independent weavers. We also ran to two public events at Whitchurch. Our future plans include more group exhibitions in the north of the UK.