Saori in Tasmania – Poatina
Over the last few weeks I have been travelling and teaching workshops in Tasmania. Every single workshop I do, is a privilege. To be with others as they encounter weaving for the first time, or how participants share their skills and experience of weaving with me, thinking up ways of creating in amongst the warp. But Tasmania, its landscape and inhabitants, thankfully defies my usual overuse of cliche. My first photo speaks of the diversity of Tasmania’s landscape. A fairly new weaver wove this in Hobart. Handspun yarn was a feature in both Tasmanian workshops due to the high amount of spinners and fibre lovers there. This piece of cloth on the loom kept emerging with detailed work which I think reflected the sum of what I experienced.
The first workshop was at the old Hydro village of Poatina. You’ll see the views here one way across the valley from the high vantage point. The other direction was the high Great Western Tiers. What a perfect location to weave in. There were a large number of participants here, much more than I usually have. But it was so well organised and even with a variety of looms, it worked exceptionally well.
Up into the Central Highlands at Miena we were fortunate to receive a good cover of snow overnight.
Snow is quite the occasion for us as it is rare for us to see.
The Hydro projects in Tasmania are fantastic and are a real tribute to the families who worked on them. These towns housed families and created communities which would be very rare today. The landscape is punctuated with transmission towers which I think influenced some of our weaving there. Warps and wefts can create the spidery lines of the electrical wires. It would be an amazing place to do a project with and no doubt many have. In the same way I always think that the highway construction teams, who don’t have communities to be housed in aside from temporary metal boxes, would be a rewarding place to be an artist in residence. Capturing the work being done and a snippet of the lives of the people doing it. Alas, I haven’t heard of the RMS suggesting such a thing. Thank you to the weavers in Poatina and to Di Kearney for organising and liaising with me to make this possible. Also thank you to the staff at Poatina Chalet. The workshops were hosted and supported by the Handweavers, Spinners and Dyers Guild of Tasmania. See more Poatina Workshop photos here.
As a prompt for weaves based on transmission towers see here.
