Caroline McQuarrie, This Blasted Heath

Incorporating landscape photographs hand woven into fabric on a digital Jacquard loom, This Blasted Heathd epicts small, overlooked sites in Te Waipounamu, Aotearoa.

Initially the sites were photographed on medium format black and white film and scanned. The digital files were then used to create hand woven textiles on a TC2 digital Jacquard loom.

Why re-create aphotograph as a piece of fabric? To ‘take’ a photo can be a quick, instinctive gesture, a moment’sattention captured. To re-make that image with a slow, hand-made process implies a closer payingattention. Making something by hand takes time, and care. Re-making these digitised images gives them a different context and opens our attention to them in a new way. In the weaving, the image loses fine detail found in the original photograph, yet we are drawn closer to the details in the weave. The closer we try to look, the less we see.