Jacy Wall

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material and maker 2026

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Jacy's initial training was in Constructed Textiles at Middlesex Polytechnic, after which she moved quickly from textile design to tapestry. From the start she has been interested in finding subtle ways of subverting traditional Gobelin tapestry weaving techniques, making interventions of one sort or another. Themes around impermanence, and the strength to be found in re-making, run through all of her textile work. In the interests of re-use some of the yarns and colours she uses are left from long completed projects, the combining of these textures and hues from past work informing the direction of the new. She works instinctively now, from an idea rather than an actual design. In the early years of her career, Jacy worked a lot with bold colour, but more recently her palette has softened and she finds particular interest in the variations of tone to be found in blacks and whites.

 

Jacy weaves with natural materials, wool, linen, silk and cotton. According to how each of these yarns have been spun, or finished, she finds they offer all the variation in tone and texture that she looks for. When dyeing, these variations provide subtly different starting points, dyes taking differently on different yarns. How the yarns are combined can give different effects; for instance one strand of red silk woven with the same colour wool helps intensify the red from the small additional sheen of the silk. The same goes for undyed yarn, a strand of bleached linen gives a highlight to natural wool.

 

Sometimes when a tapestry has not gone well, Jacy cuts it up, focussing on the areas that are most interesting, then turning things around.  Rearranging the pieces creates a completely new story, which is then told through the improvised joining and mending of the fragile sections, stabilising the weaving. Some work is just given a new dimension by extending the piece, or adding patches, stitching or wrapping extra yarn onto the face of the tapestry. In the 1990s Jacy began printmaking, primarily etching, as a companion medium to her tapestry work. Each of these two very different processes influencing the other. Being able to combine and alter printmaking plates helped free up her approach to tapestry, leading to the first time she took a pair of scissors to a weaving. She found that plunging into that risk allowed something new to emerge. More recently she has moved from printmaking into exploring ceramics, working for the first time in 3D, and beginning to feed back these new ideas into her textiles. These forays into other media are, like her tapestries, about investigating materials, which for her is a necessary part of expressing ideas.

  

Jacy has in the past worked on several public art tapestry commissions, including for a bank in Amsterdam, and for her local hospital. Her more personal work about mending culminated in an ACE grant in 2012 for her project The Nature of Mending, involving other artists in the theme, and looking at relevant items in museum collections. Jacy is a Trustee for the Theo Moorman Trust for Weavers, and is committed to ensuring that the craft of weaving, in whatever form, endures and is understood into the future.  

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Click images for details and if you are interested in any of Jacy Wall's work please enquire below.​​​​

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