The design fuses two motifs and the numbers written into the drawing reflect the system from which each motif is generated. The first motif, consisting of a numerical count up from base to top of the grid, is a system of 9, 7, 5, 3, 1 taken from Paul Klee’s lecture notebooks Vol 2, The Nature of Nature in the form of a basic geometrical model for drawing a tree. This is a system he used to generate tree drawings as a sequence of tapering lines, fusing structure and growth with a simple model drawn in pencil and red pencil crayon. The second motif, consisting of the use of Fibonacci numbers to determine the width and length of lines, is an outline of a geometrical tree trunk like schema. Both structures are overlaid on the grid diagram OGVDS-GW, which has been used in all of my drawings between 2008 and 2022. Subsequent adjustments were made by collaging on new sections of paper, create a shifting sense of build-up.

In how I classify the different aspects of my work, the cartoon drawing for this tapestry falls into the category of ‘compendium’. These are works in which is where several different methods and motifs are stacked on top of each other, to create a mesh of such complexity that in both making the drawing and looking at it a slow process of visual untangling occurs. In this instance, I began by thinking about how this would end up, transposed in to a tapestry, for which I would have no control over the working processes. The sequence of drawing experiments therefore become a stage in the development, rather than an arrival point and as such are proposing ways in which interpretation of the idea of ‘tree’ might need to be guessed at or improvised. Part of the thinking here is that meaning always remains out of reach and out of control and my obsession with looking, adjusting, shifting and correcting the work benefits greatly from the process of handing over control of ‘the problem’ of making a work to a team of skilled weavers. The buried aspects of quotation, from Paul Klee and, over a much longer period, the grid work of British artists Gillian Wise, thus got taken on a much stranger journey than I could imagine for myself.

Because the drawing was to be transposed into a tapestry, additional material complexities were added as means to generate surprise through processes I had no control over. I was thinking about how visual equivalence to translation might become embodied in the final hand woven and hand dyed piece. A key aspect here is that the addition of collaged elements using 640gsm paper adds a relief layer of approximately 1.5mm. This creates shadows, which interact with the pencil lines of various widths and densities as another subtle gradation of line. The weavers worked from a high-resolution digital photograph and colour swatches. This process involved forms of reinvention germane to weaving only, such as the recreation of an ultra-fine pencil line through a shift in the weave over a larger area, how and why this works I have no idea, but it does. Elsewhere a particular grain and texture of watercolour has been mimicked by adding a small amount of sparkly fabric to the weave, again, it works brilliantly, I have no idea why. Ultimately, this work has an address to architectural space, an idea of the memory of drawing embedded in any physical structure and a sense of floating

Andrew Bick, October 2020