Woven colour in Margo Selby’s Intersect Series
From across a room, Margo Selby’s Intersect works can look like arrangements of coloured blocks. Closer up, the boundaries become much less simple. Narrow bands pass between the larger areas, and the weave gives each change of colour a smaller structure of its own.
Selby develops colour and proportion through weaving, so the composition is built into the textile. In Intersect Series, Warp 1, Work 1, a broad red band runs beside a dark field and a stepped area of blue. The thinner lines between them make a considerable difference to how those larger sections sit together.
Work 3 uses a lighter ground. A descending red edge meets bands of green, grey, blue and brown, with the pale area opening beneath them. The two works are related, but the balance changes quite substantially. One holds the colour within a darker composition; the other leaves more light around it.
The other Warp 1 works shown here make that comparison worth extending. A small shift in the width of a band, or in the colour beside it, changes a much larger part of the textile. It’s a nice reason to look beyond the first overall pattern and spend a little time with the threads.
