“The art of weaving is a profound metaphor for understanding the workings of the universe and our place in it. Through the physical/metaphorical process of weaving, we gain a better understanding of this world and how we as human beings are woven into it. We are bound to our bodies with the fragile threads of earth”.
The ideas for WEAVE (Women’s Engaging Arts Vision for Everyone) were developed following research carried out by artist Rhonda Fenwick for the Creative Lab at University of Durham as part of the 2025 Durham Culture Bid. This part of the project focused on women of great achievement born in County Durham. The research highlighted the lives of many great women whose achievements are submerged, disguised, disappeared, and invisible yet played pivotal roles in society and the world.
Women such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gertrude Bell, Sheila Mackie, Janet Taylor and Cecily Neville Duchess of York to name but a few. The concept of ‘weave’ in terms of weaving cloth, carpets, stories and rivers, in fact all aspects of weaving, in one form or another is the basis of our work.
Looking through the lens of weaving, seen as a metaphor for life
Imagine life as a loom. The lengths of string composing the warp are pulled taught, stretched out like so many days, months, and years – a suspended vertical calendar. And making up the weft are threads of varying colour and texture mingling in a sometimes chaotic and sometimes beautiful way. Each thread represents the presence of a life.
In this imagery, each person is both loom and thread. People are woven into the fabric that becomes our own lives and we are woven into theirs.
Life as a Thread
The idea that life is like a thread is by no means new. Its origin has ancient roots in the old stories – in myth and legend. In Greek mythology three sisters – The Moirai, or Fates worked as a collective of weavers. Clotho spun the thread of life, while Lachesis measured its length, and Atropos determined the end of each thread, snipping it off with her gleaming shears.
But even when a thread is cut, it still remains part of the fabric of the lives into which it was woven. You can cut off a life, but the impact it had for good or for ill isn’t erased by its ending. The colour and texture of the thread remain part of those into whose lives it was integrated.
Artists – Rhonda Fenwick, Marion Thompson and Diana Raw (photos by Rhonda Fenwick)
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