Margo Selby is a British textile artist making visionary lampas hand-woven artworks. These works are both painterly, in regard to the optical mixing of pure colour – and sculptural, due to the phyicality of woven thread as a mode of construction.
She established her eponymous textiles company in 2003 and now leads a small team of designers and makers in her Whitstable studio, creating her own range of fabric and products.
An insight into the weaving process of Margo Selby as she prepares to present the VEXILLUM series for Collect International Art Fair for Modern Craft and Design.
Created by independent filmmaker Phil Miller, with original music by Peter Coyte.
While our Whitstable studio remains closed to customers, we continue to run smoothly as usual, shipping out orders around the world daily.
We wish you all good health and look forward to a time when we can throw open our Whitstable studio doors again.
More than ever our homes are our sanctuaries – and we love to work with you to create a space filled with colour, texture, warmth and vibrancy.
‘Art Into Industry’ is Margo Selby’s description of her personal ethos – connecting her hand-woven art practice with the design and production of decorative, functional textiles for the commercial market.
An example of this approach is the fabric Assembly, a design that relates closely to Margo’s artworks, especially the Tessellation Series, in its aesthetic. In Assembly Margo explores how colour and structure unite, how yarn can be blended, concealed and revealed within a cloth to create abstract colour studies.
Margo says: “I wanted to create a vivid cloth evocative of my hand-woven artworks, crossing the boundaries between art and design”.
The industrially manufactured cloth is developed from hand-produced samples woven on the same 24 shaft dobby loom Margo uses to create her artworks. This process engages the craft of the hand-weaver, followed by commercial development through extensive sampling with the skilled technicians at industrial textile mills, challenging the capabilities of their looms.
This practice cultivates creative innovation, whilst combining skilled craft and commercial accessibility.
Located in the British coastal town of Whitstable, the Margo Selby weaving studio has a range of looms, including the largest, a 24-shaft dobby loom, on which much of our development work is done.
Margo opens the weaving studio and gallery spaces to other artists, writers and makers, for selected events, and in 2019 the studio hosted the opening reception for the Whitstable Biennale.
Sharing and growing the craft of weaving is important to Margo’s practice and throughout the year she hosts weaving workshops, welcoming both experienced and novice weavers.
The studio is open to visitors Monday – Friday throughout the year, we have a small showroom with products and artworks on display and available to purchase.
As a textile design studio we often create a single fabric for a specific project brief rather than working in seasonal collections, and that’s why we produce Limited Production fabrics and products.
Not being defined by seasons or trends, Margo uses an artistic, spontaneous and instinctive approach to create her woven fabrics so we prefer not to date them or group them into collections. Instead we weave limited quantities and produce small batches of product. We love to be creative and to keep designing so we choose to limit the production run to ensure there is always room for something new.
