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116 SUMMER 2024
About CreationAn expression of beginning of time is the subject of Austrian weaver Beate von Harten’s latest big project. Denna Jones talks to the creative about the ideas behind the project and how the grand scheme is beginning to take shape
What existed before our cosmos came into being billions of years ago? The Creation tapestry is a monumental work-in-
progress designed and woven by Austrian artist Beate von Harten, expressing her conceptual and visual imaginings about the ‘before’.
The tapestry’s abstract imagery is not based on religious teachings or modelled on the Big Bang theory of quantum physics. Instead, she says, it conveys essence before existence ‘when a spirit radiated its influence to create space, time, energy, matter’. Scientists describe this ‘before’ as a ‘concentrated cosmos’ preceded by a ‘singularity’ in which space and time lose meaning. Religions and science differ on the universe’s creation, but von Harten’s philosophy allows her to explain what came ‘before’ and its ‘lost’ meaning.
The Creation’s eventual size—70 metres wide by 0.80 metres high—and its unfolding narrative are inspired by the Bayeux tapestry. Embroidered following the 1066 defeat of the Saxons by William of Normandy, the Bayeux tapestry’s events are recorded in storyboard format across the tapestry’s width. Von Harten has completed Creation’s warp and is finalising the warp’s ‘silvery colour’ and ‘silk y weft’.
Von Harten (who shares a textile design and restoration atelier in Vienna with her daughter, Celine) is still at the beginning of this continuous flatweave, woven on an upright handloom. She describes her weaving progress as ‘pages’, with two completed to date. The abstract design is also a work-in-progress as she conceptualises the ‘logical order’ of her ‘spiritual theme’. The Creation’s completion date will be in two to five years’ time, depending on resources to hire other weavers to help her.
The Creation features free-float warps in its inaugural metres to reference when the universe was not yet ‘completely woven’. Abstract drawings will be embroidered on the woven surface in silver and gold threads ‘as a “language” for all peoples’, she says, using laid and couch stitch (also known as Bayeux stitch) and other embroidery stitches. Rather than being wound on a beam, the warp unfolds from the back of the loom and is plaited with weights to maintain tension for the weave on the loom. Von Harten chose
