TESSELLATION 2020 is an installation of 6 unique hand woven panels from Margo Selby’s ongoing TESSELLATION series in our cafe. These works are presented to coincide with We Will Walk—Art and Resistance in the American South curated by Hannah Collins, with Paul Goodwin.

The Gee’s Bend Quilts currently upstairs in the main galleries have long been a source of inspiration for Selby, particularly those by Annie Mae Young, Mary Lee Bendolph, Polly Bennett and Loretta Pettway. Rhythm; colour; rectilinearity; division of the rectangle; are interpreted through Selby’s own practice of weave.

In Selby’s works the thread itself is the unit of construction. There are equal units in each panel – over 5000 individual threads in warp and weft. In a game of scale, moving from micro to macro, each composition is a development of weave structures blown-up and abstracted. The method of production requires exact planning and complex mathematical calculation, as well as dexterity.

Selby’s use of colour is instinctive and celebratory. Blocks of cool greys and subtly tinted whites, sit in hard contrast against emerald green, teal, orange and pink. The proportions are arrived at by way of a combination of intuition and measurement. They are sometimes harmonious and sometimes jarring – like the ebb and flow of conversations, the harmonious companionship or clashing of personalities.

These works descend from a tradition Bauhaus design and colour theory, and European Modernism more generally.