St Catherine's College, Oxford

Tapestries on the back wall of the Great Hall St Catherine's College, Oxford 
photograph Petr Krejci 

study for Dominus
watercolour
30.5 x 24cm
1979

study for Nova et Vetera 
watercolour
21 x 18.5 cm
1978
collection Ashmolean Museum

The Great Hall
photograph Petr Krejci

When I was an undergraduate at the end of the fifties I had the daunting task of showing Arne Jacobsen around the town He was to design our new college (St Catherine’s Society, as it was then known, occupied a building that looked like a bicycle shed attached to Christchurch). I walked with him through Oxford extolling with youthful enthusiasm this or that pinnacle, ogee or volute. Almost everything I liked he dismissed as ‘mere decoration’. Rashly I asked him what sort of artefacts he envisaged for the building. I received an answer that mostly dealt with knives and forks and door handles all of which he would design himself. He was especially adamant about the integrity of walls: they should not be ‘disturbed’.

In the mid-seventies I received intimations that Alan Bullock, with some of the fellows, and even some undergraduates (notably Cordelia Monsey), had begun to think about tapestries for the Hall. 

We agreed that I would produce designs speculatively and after six months I presented my ideas in the form of cartoons, having worked out the weaving aspects already with the Edinburgh Tapestry Company.

My main aim was to reinforce the impression the Hall gave of an ancient gathering place (e.g. an Anglo-Saxon mead-hall) while subduing, by a variation in texture, its overwhelming concrete grimness. This seemed to call for some allusion to heraldic banners (verticality was already implicit in the divided shapes of the principal wall).

The ordeal of St Catherine is traditionally indicated by the wheel which broke apart spontaneously during the attempt to put her to death: the legend relates the use of a machine involving four knived wheels. The explosion of this instrument forms the subject of the two side panels which share the same design, one being a mirror image of the other (though they differ in nuances of colour and weaving).

The central panel carries on a theme used in paintings in which the same words are played against each other in a counterpoint of letters. The texts used were the mottoes of the College and that of the University. The colours used on the exterior border are those of the University’s insignia. Worked into the central panel are colour echoes of the flanking tapestries plus the colours of the College itself. 

The same two devices inform the three smaller tapestries that decorate the back wall of the Hall where they hang high, as pennants, clear of the serving area.

The weavers, with some licence for improvisation, worked from life size black and white cartoons which carried instructions rather like Painting by Numbers. Once the result was installed it was easy to see what a magnificent and imaginative job the Edinburgh Tapestry Co. had done in interpreting my design, making it predictably richer in wool than ever paint can be.

Adapted from Works & Texts 1992 page 206-207