I’m skipping to the end here to describe the keynote address given by Margo Selby on the final night of the NEWS Conference. She is so young to have made such great strides in handweaving and in founding a commercial textile design business. She is an enthusiastic speaker with a great deal of positive energy that emanates from her.
Her presentation was focused on the phrase she uses on her website (and is the title of the video that follows): “Beauty is the First Test.” She does wonderful work with color and texture, and it was particularly compelling to me since I’d just spent the weekend in Sarah Saulson’s class creating cloth that would balance the colors of our painted warps with the various weave structures we had threaded on our looms.
Margo brought lots of items from her commercial textile line: scarves and wraps, small zippered bags, and lovely jackets and tops, all made from her lively fabrics which have silk warps woven with synthetic wefts that create a stretchy, bouncy fabric. I was completely enthralled with her use of color and stretch and texture and asked where I could find her line in the US, to which she replied that the very things on display were for sale! It was hard to choose, but when I am in the presence of such beautiful textiles I cannot walk away empty handed….
Margo ended her talk with a video that included her and several other textile artists (and one woodworker). This video includes a bobbin lace maker!!… and how often do you see any attention given to lace makers? The take away message in this video is this: “There is no place in the world for ugly mathematics.” Clearly, Margo’s motto that ‘beauty is the first test’ demonstrates what we all know, that the mathematic proportions of size, color relationships, use of texture and smoothness, is the basis of beauty in everything made by hand.
