WELCOME TO THE EUROPEAN TAPESTRY FORUM WEBSITE.

European Tapestry Forum was founded in 2001. Created by a group of tapestry weavers from across Europe, it seeks to encourage the continuing development of woven tapestry as a viable artistic medium in Europe.

See our latest exhibition ARTAPESTRY3

It's founding aims are:
-to be a network for coordinated action, sharing of experience and training between tapestry weavers in Europe.
-to support and contribute to an ongoing development end renewal of tapestry weaving in Europe.
-to assist in the development of professional national organisations for tapestry weavers to secure the visibility of the weavers and their work.

To give a flavour of how ETF works, below is an edited  version of a presentation given at a conference on European contemporary tapestry and textile art in Paris, 2nd December 2008, by Thomas Cronenberg, ETF Steering Group member:

EUROPEAN TAPESTRY FORUM, AN ARTIST-LED INITIATIVE

European Tapestry Forum is an organisation of professional tapestry weavers which seeks to raise the profile of tapestry as an art form - and to provide a platform for tapestry artists. ETF wants to bring tapestry weavers together for collaboration and cooperation; exchang e of ideas; learning and training.

With its regular juried ARTAPESTRY exhibitions, ETF provides a showcase for work by contemporary tapestry artists, and an opportunity for their works to be exposed to a larger European audience.

HISTORY:

ETF just celebrated its 10th anniversary in January 2010.

At the turn of the century, a group of forward-thinking Danish tapestry artists organised a seminar and workshop, Back to Basics’. Some 20 artists from ten countries across Europe attended; from Denmark and Scandinavia to the UK, the Czech Republic and Poland.

The discussions were those familiar to anyone involved in the tapestry and textile art fields:

*how to raise the status and visibility of tapestry as an art form in the visual arts and the wider world;

* how to encourage new generations of artists to choose tapestry as their mode of expression;

* how to stimulate critical writing and thought about the medium.

The organisation ETF developed around a core of tapestry artists who attended that original meeting. In 2001, the Steering Committee was formed.

Our goal is to improve the visibility of woven tapestry as an art form in Europe. We want to show the interested general public, the museum world, and the art critics that tapestry exists as a current, contemporary fine art discipline.

The Steering Committee decided on four major programme planks:

1) A Secretariat, which was set up in Denmark;

2) A triennial exhibition, which became known as ARTAPESTRY;

3) Master classes;

4) And a website – www.tapestry.dk

The original Steering Committee had members from Denmark and Norway, Sweden and Finland, the United Kingdom and Germany. They were soon joined by tapestry artists from the Czech Republic and France.

The Steering Committee meets several times a year for a day and a half. We largely each fund our own travelling expenses from our own pockets. Our early meetings were long and involved as there was so much to discuss, so much to decide. As time has gone on, we have needed to meet less often, as we have concensus on key issues:

We agree on triennial format, partly for organisational reasons, and because tapestry is a slow medium.

After much deliberation, we decided on the following, simple definition of tapestry as being: a weft-faced fabric, hand-woven by the artist or artists, with discontinuous wefts.

We came up with the following guidelines for artists:

• The exhibition is open to contemporary, professional tapestry artists who live and work in Europe. That includes Turkey and Russia, but not Israel.

• Artists may submit digital images of up to three works for consideration by the jury.

• Works must have been made in the previous three years.
• Minimum size: Woven area of one square meter. There is some leeway on size; the jury has the final say. There is a tendency in some countries towards large works; we did not want large and tiny next to each other.
• Artists must commit their work for a maximum two years as the exhibition will tour to at least 3 European venues.
• An entry fee. Some feel this keeps artists from some countries from submitting. But we need this fee – as it is, it barely covers some of our administrative costs and the costs for jurying.

We decided that ARTAPESTRY should be a juried show chosen by an independent panel of tapestry weavers, museum curators and experts. We decided on a large jury of five people as we were looking for a diversity of voices, and have looked both times for jurors from various countries as well as experts and museum people.

We put out a call for entries which we sent to textile magazines, posted on our website and e-mailed our personal contacts.

We received hundreds of submissions for each of the ARTAPESTRY shows.

The selection process is as follows:

Artists are asked to submit images to our Secretariat in Denmark. That is, exactly two images per tapestry – a full view and one detail.

These are then shown completely anonymously to our jurors in a three-day meeting at the Gammel Dok Arts Centre in Copenhagen. The Steering Committee is not involved in the jurying beyond being setting up the room and being on call to answer questions.

For ARTAPESTRY2, the jury consisted of:

Edit Andras, art historian and art reviewer from Budapest;

Wlodzimierz Cygan, tapestry artist and professor from Lodz, Poland;

Annika Ekdahl, tapestry artist and educator from Sweden;

Fiona Mathison, tapestry artist and educator, Edinburgh/Scotland/UK;

Bernard Schotter, administrator of Les Gobelins in France.

For ARTAPESTRY (1), the jury consisted of:

Archie Brennan, tapestry artist from the UK/US;

Shelly Goldsmith tapestry artist and educator from the UK;

Jan Groth, artist and tapestry designer from Norway;

Marcel Marois, tapestry artist and educator from Canada;

Nina Hobolth, museum director and curator, Aalborg/Denmark;

Cooperation with museums:

We started the first ARTAPESTRY show with firm commitments from two museums: Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum in Aalborg and Deutsches Textilmuseum in Krefeld in Germany. We met in Aalborg early on with Nina Hobolth from Aalborg and Brigitte Tietzel from Krefeld to discuss cooperation. Having them on board from the start was a key to the success of this project. All of our museum partners have been a pleasure to workwith,.

We have drawn up a Cooperation Agreement for our work with museums:

It is quite simple, organisationally: ETF provides a package consisting of the exhibition, which has been chosen by an international jury; a press kit and PR info, design for an invitation (which the museum may or may not use), and the catalogue.

The artists pay for shipping of the works – and insurance - from their studios to the first museum in the tour. The museums pay for insurance for the artwork while in their care; they put on an opening, and take care of any educational activities or guided tours during the show, and they pay for onward transport and insurance for the complete exhibition to the next museum.

For this complete package, which includes a previously agreed number of catalogues, each museum pays a set exhibition fee to ETF.

We developed this model after we decided early on that applying for EU funding was not an option for this project at that time. There are various issues that make it difficult, including the fact that this is a project that works in many countries. Also,

strict EU accounting rules and the paperwork involved made it too difficult for us to do at this stage in our development. ETF is run by busy artists who volunteer their scant free time.

At the moment, our Steering Committee consists of the following people:

Margrethe Agger (Denmark); Anet Brusgaard (Denmark); Thomas Cronenberg (Germany); Ariadna Donner (Finland); Peter Horn (Germany); Fiona Hutchison (Scotland/UK); Anne Jackson (England/UK); Katherine Lavocat (France); and Renata Rozsívalová (Czech Republic).

This group has been quite stable. Most of us have been involved in two rounds of ARTAPESTRY. Anne Jackson joined us after ARTAPESTRY(1), and Ariadna Donner more recently.

Our collaborative model of working is a pragmatic response to our needs. We have little hierarchy, and each have designated areas we concentrate on. Basically, we have a sub-committee system, which I also call a “buddy system”. We have broken down the big job into areas of work:

*general administration/Secretariat;

*preparation of the call for entries;

*jurying;

*contact with museums;

*PR and publicity;

*catalogue preparation.

The buddy system comes in here: Every member has close contact with one or two people on the Steering Committee, usually from his or her region.

Margrethe Agger and Anet Brusgaard deal with everything in Denmark, cooperation with the museum in Aalborg, setting up jurying meeting.

Anet Brusgaard runs the Secretariat, assisted by Margrethe Agger.

Katherine Lavocat and Renata Rozsívalová worked on the call for entries.

Fiona Hutchison, Peter Horn and I do the catalogue, while Fiona Hutchison, Anne Jackson and I do PR in English.

All of us do outreach to museums, asking museums in our countries whether they are interested. Coordination with museums has usually been handled geographically. The Danes deal with Aalborg, I handled Krefeld; and Katherine and I both coordinated efforts with Angers.

Our system works in such a way that if one person is busy or away, his buddy can take care of immediate tasks.

None of this would work as easily without e-mail and mobile phones. They are probably the most essential working tool we have. We are all very busy people, but we are always reachable via e-mail.

At the moment, we do not have the funding or the manpower to employ an administrative assistant, or any staff. But the buddy system which we have developed means that we are getting better and better at communication with the artists and museums, making sure they get swift answers to their questions.

And of course it helps that we are already on our second installment of ARTAPESTRY, and already looking ahead to ARTAPESTRY3. We spent a lot of time figuring out what we want to do, and how we would go about it. It gets a little easier each time because we can draw on our earlier experience.

When you finally get to the opening, you think: “I don’t know what all the fuss is about – it’s just a matter of getting some tapestries to Denmark and getting them up on the wall.”

But if I look into my computer, which I did to write this speech, I find more than 30 file folders relating to European Tapestry Forum, including the major headings called ARTAPESTRY1 and ARTAPESTRY2. The ARTAPESTRY2 folder alone has 28 sub-folders. We have all written countless e-mails.

So it is a whole lot of work – but it is also a lot of fun. Instead of sitting back and lamenting the lack of visibility of tapestry as a fine art discipline, we are doing something to get tapestry out there, onto museum walls, and into the newspapers, magazines and specialist journals.

We have seen mainstream titles like the Danish daily newspaper Politiken or the fashion magazine Elle write about our shows, not to mention articles in specialist journals like FiberArts and Textilforum.