The Black Gold Tapestry

by

Beautiful and gentle, but with a political pulse like a metronome, the Black Gold Tapestry is contemporary fine craft based on a medieval masterpiece. Cinematic in scale, it unfolds the story of oil over seven millenniums of human discovery and technical innovation. Inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, and replete with tiny, intricate details to tempt our curiosity, Sandra Sawatzky’s hand-stitched tapestry becomes a sort of allegorical modern-day take on The Pilgrim’s Progress, both a testament to perseverance and a cautionary tale.

It took Sawatzky nine years to complete her tapestry, on view at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary from Oct. 7 to May 21. At a length of 220 feet – but just 20 inches high – it could span the wings of a Boeing 747. Sawatzky, who lives in Calgary, meticulously planned and drew the design on paper before she began single-handedly embroidering linen sourced from New York with hand-dyed thread in colours based on ceramic glazes from Ancient China.

Around the time she was starting, American sociologist and philosopher Richard Sennett wrote a book called The Craftsman. In it, he discusses the human need to make things by hand, and after much practice, seek the point of perfection. He argues that craftsmanship is the path to personal fulfillment, and applauds the dedication and time it takes – attributes hard to apply to a machine. Over the last three years, Sawatzky spent nearly 10 hours a day sewing, moving through history, touching on landmarks like the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, before ending in today’s technological era.

Sawatzky is an artist and a filmmaker, an aesthete and a realist. She writes every day. She journals. She blogs. Her myriad inspirations for this project span every conceivable time period and geography. But it’s forming connections that really make her tick. That, and anything epic; she loves epic, but perhaps not as much as she loves beauty. She was stirred, she says, by a world increasingly “inundated with ugliness.

“We go out onto the streets and they are tearing out all the trees, putting up cement buildings, not really looking at the aesthetics of it, how we as people will respond,” she says. For Sawatzky, beauty is its own justification. “When someone sees something beautiful, they open up. It doesn’t matter what that beautiful thing is. Beautiful art – it feeds the soul.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by William Morris, Sawatzky’s “guiding light.” A poet and medievalist associated with the British Arts and Crafts Movement in the late 1800s, Morris was a proponent of Aestheticism, a response to the Industrial Revolution. A remarkable designer – of textiles, among other things – he sought to reinstate beauty and the handmade in order to ward off what he saw as the demise of civilization. Sawatzky also uses beauty to capture people’s attention, hoping to shift their perspective and encourage them to talk “in a less combative way.”

Sawatzky says she found many parallels with movie production. Like film, her story unfolds scene by scene. Time passes exponentially. And like the Bayeux Tapestry, completed around 1077, her work makes a decisive shift in its final frames. The Bayeux Tapestry, commissioned by Bishop Odo of Kent, the half-brother of William the Conqueror, depicts William’s long preparations for war and culminates in the 1066 Battle of Hastings, which cleared the way for Norman rule in England. In the last scenes, the Latin text reads: “Here they fell; At the same time English and Franks: in the battle. Hic Harold Rex interfectus est: Here Harold – King – has been killed.”

War is an ugly business. So are tailing ponds, obsolete oil tankers and oil-covered birds. The turning point, the Hic Harold Rex interfectus est of the Black Gold Tapestry, is the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, considered the largest oil spill in history. Here, Sawatzky uses no words.

Her commentary can be seen, instead, in the bestiary that runs along the top and bottom of the frieze. In the Bayeux Tapestry, real and imagined animals snarl and prowl along the margins before the battle. After Hastings, crumpled bodies and riderless horses take their place. Sawatzky’s bestiary of dinosaurs, so amusing in prehistory, and an abiding presence for millennia after that, are replaced in her last panel by 11 dead bodies representing the men who died in the oil-rig disaster.

Sawatzky stitched the Roman god of beginnings and endings, Janus, who looks to the future and the past, on the final panel of the Black Gold Tapestry. Perhaps she was thinking of Morris, who once wrote: “The past is not dead, it is living in us and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.”

The Digital Revolution may be slowing down. Some say we are now in the Age of Experience, where retro is all the rage. The Black Gold Tapestry, like the Bayeux Tapestry, is unique in its time. It is epic. It is beautiful. It is political. And it is definitely retro.

Glenbow

Glenbow Museum

130 9 Ave SE, Calgary, Alberta T2G 0P3

403-268-4100

please enable javascript to view

Visit Website

CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS