Rooted in the past: Garden Carpets at Dovecot Studios

Two contemporary weavings that reference the great Garden Carpets of classical Iran are now on show in Dundee. Dorothy Armstrong tells their story

Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh has a unique collaboration with leading contemporary artists, producing weavings designed by David Hockney, Chris Ofili and Elizabeth Blackadder, among many others. Now Dovecot’s reputation for innovation has been allied with traditional Asian practices, in a project taking inspiration from the world-famous Wagner Garden Carpet from 17th-century Iran in Glasgow’s Burrell Collection. Two new Dovecot weavings, the Moussavi Garden Carpet Tapestry and the Whitburgh Garden Carpet, are currently on display at the V&A Dundee. Both give new life and relevance to Iran’s centuries-old tradition.

The Whitburgh Garden Carpet is a gun-tufted rug, with a luscious pile and cold but vivid colours. It is inspired by Elizabeth Salvesen’s celebrated walled garden at Whitburgh House, on a site 700 feet above sea level outside Edinburgh. The design of the Whitburgh evolved as apprentice weaver Sophie McCaffrey and master weaver Louise Trotter worked on it together.

The great carpets of 16th and 17th-century Safavid Iran celebrate the garden as a sacred place, a paradise on earth. But although they are aesthetically and spiritually refined, they are also domestic: places where you could have a lovely picnic. Dovecot’s Whitburgh carpet echoes this. It’s a kitchen garden, segmented by paths rather than waterways, but it has that same promise of tranquillity and the domestic pleasures of the table.

The echoes of old Persian carpets continue in a depiction of Whitburgh’s delightful glasshouse. It sits where the dedication would be found on a Persian carpet, and its crosshatching evokes the elegance of Iranian calligraphy.

The Moussavi Garden Carpet Tapestry is a flatweave. Its design is quartered by shimmering waterways, and it contains hidden motifs of Scotland’s endangered plants and animals. It celebrates nature, but at the same time carries a pressing modern message about sustainability and extinction. It was designed by leading Iranian architect Farshid Moussavi, and woven by Dovecot weavers Louise Trotter, Naomi Robertson and Elaine Wilson.

Moussavi inflects the sinuous patterns of Iranian carpets with her own modernist angularity and uses a heathery northern palette rather than the rich, high-contrast of Asian rugs. Moussavi was immersed in these very Scots colours when she studied architecture in Dundee, where her carpet is now displayed.

Moussavi’s design assumed that the weaving could exactly replicate her computer-generated design. But a loom has limitations in the precision of geometry it can create, and wool has its own life. The Dovecot weavers report a greater struggle with this pixel-by-pixel design than in translating the painterly gestures of other artists’ work. Indeed, the original design had to be modified to reflect what can be done on a loom by a human hand.

This is a particularly contemporary difficulty, but other observations by the Dovecot weavers might have been heard five or even fifteen centuries ago. Three weavers had to work at once on the Moussavi carpet to finish it in time, sitting uncomfortably close. The weaving was rolled at the bottom of the loom as they worked, so they couldn’t be sure Moussavi’s intricate geometries would turn out. These are experiences shared by weavers through time, and take us from the cool order of Dovecot’s airy studio in modern Edinburgh to the interior of a weaving shed in urban Persia, or a loom set up outside a tent in the dusty scrub of Anatolia.