Instagram: @margoselbystudio
Vexillum IV, 2020
Mixed yarns: Tencel, silk, cotton and wool. Handwoven. 180 x 170 cm. Unique piece. Signed on reverse and supplied with certificate of authenticity.
£18,000 (including UK delivery)
Zoetrope, 2021
Mixed yarns: Tencel, silk and cotton. Handwoven. 3 panels, each 120 x 40 cm. Unique piece. Signed on reverse and supplied with certificate of authenticity.
£14,000 (including UK delivery)
Margo Selby is a textile artist making works in weave on a 24 shaft dobby loom. Her most recent works are both painterly, in regard to the optical mixing of pure colour, and sculptural, due to the physicality of woven thread as a mode of construction. The pieces are stretched and wall-mounted, but operate as objects rather than pictures or decoration – they are non-representational, and their colours are integral rather than applied to a surface. Formal aesthetics are paramount, and in constant intersection – colour, form, shape, orientation, rhythm – the grammar of Margo’s language.
The Vexillum series, begun in 2019, has been a leap in scale from the intimacy of her artworks to date – the human to the architectural. Installed last year at Somerset House as a triptych for Collect 2020, Vexillum (I, II and III) was an imposing secular altarpiece – a sensory chapel. Vexillum IV, hitherto unexhibited, is a fourth work of that series – and stands alone as a herald. It is celebratory, but with an element of aggression – a ‘vexillum’ being a portent of battle, as well as a Latin sail, and the delicate fronds of a feathery plume.
The designs are developed through drawing and yarn windings, and then executed to an exact plan. There are 18,000 strands in Vexillum IV – each one of those hand-threaded, counted and re-counted. Geometric pattern is made macro in the fractal compositions, expanding infinitely – the forms optically project and recede, creating a sensation of dynamism, and almost becoming images – alluding as they do to stairways and steps or pyramid forms – they are a chromatic hall of mirrors.